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Indefinite Imprisonment For Web Site Content
Suriken writes "In an unprecedented move, the New Zealand Solicitor General is seeking an indefinite prison sentence against American businessman Vince Siemer for alleged breach of an interim gag order now more than three years old. Siemer was jailed for six weeks last year for refusing to take down a Web site accusing the chairman of an energy company of suspect business practices. Because he still refuses to take down the site, NZ Solicitor-General David Collins QC wants to lock up Siemer indefinitely, merely for asserting his own free speech. From the article: 'Siemer's [defense] claims the Solicitor General's action is barred by double jeopardy. He also maintains he had long ago proven in Court that the injunction was incorrect in fact and law but that the judge simply ignored the law and evidence. He says the gag order violates his freedom of expression guarantees in these circumstances.' Here's more coverage from an NZ television station."
Freedom of speech is not a positively enforced inalienable right in New Zealand. If he thinks his right to freedom of expression has been breached, it's possbily correct, but there are other laws which supercede it. He'll be glad to know however, that the maximum period of imprisonment without parole in New Zealand is ten years. No matter what, he can still attempt parole in 2018...
is a drastic oversimplification of the issue at hand.
A judge's order bears the force of law unless and until it is later overturned by a higher court.
You can't simply ignore it on the grounds that
The proper procedure is to ask for an interlocutory motion to allow the site to remain up, and if you don't get it, you take the site down.
Respect the authority of the Court- or the Court will show you why the government's authority is backed by force of arms.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
In Australia it is. It has to be not only true, but in the public's interest to know it.
Not in all jurisdictions.
But in any case, that's not what he's being jailed for. He's in contempt for denying a court order.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Australia does not have constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech though. We have implied freedom of speech (High Court ruling) but that would probably fail against libel/slander laws passed by Parliament.
:)
However, NZ is not yet a state of Australia, so I'm not sure why it's come up
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
In the USA, the burden is on the person supposedly being slandered to prove that they were actually slandered. Usually, this means that one has to show some sort of an actual economic loss caused by the speech AND, that the speech has to be untrue. Even with all of that, its still pretty hard to actually prevail in court and there's been some pretty famous cases where the media has won. That doesn't mean that we should drop our diligence against those who would claim liability as an excuse to censor, but it does mean that despite the admittedly awful example of domestic security legislation set by the USA, there are still some areas where we are doing ok.
This is my sig.
Further, if you had checked the site in question, you would read text like:
which is clearly defamatory, and therefore reasonable grounds for a suit and/or requesting a cease-and-desist order.So... you can get off your high horse now. It doesn't fit here.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
I am talking about Australian law. To be fair, the defence used to require a discernible "public benefit" in some states only. Even then, this was only a statutory modification - at common law, truth was always an absolute defence.
Nowadays, in all Australian states, truth is an absolute defence.
E.g. Section 25 of the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW) - "It is a defence to the publication of defamatory matter if the defendant proves that the defamatory imputations carried by the matter of which the plaintiff complains are substantially true."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation v O'Neill
"[t]he defence of justification is made out by proof of truth of the defamatory imputations. Public benefit is no longer an element of the defence."
The other uniform Defamation Acts have the same provision.
We're both pretty competitive in the sporting arena - we play rugby against eachother, along with South Africa on a yearly basis(see Tri-Nations Cup. My rustic memory of history tells me this eventuated from the end of WWI when our troops stopped in South Africa on their way home and started playing rugby there (but I could be wrong).
The same holds true for other sports - such as netball, cricket, etc
There's a few minor disputes over Australia claiming Pavlova (a dessert), Phar Lap (Race Horse) and Split Enz (Band) from us - it's not really a big thing at the end of the day, but I suppose it makes us feel better bringing up this petty stuff when we get caned in the rugby
Economically, Australia has a slightly better exchange rate than we do, with $1 (NZ) being equivalent to around 80c (Aus), give or take a fluctuation. Economics isn't my forte, so I'll stay out of this area, however every few years we get someone saying we should have a shared currency with Aussie. On that note, we didn't join the "War on Terror" (Australia did, however) - although we sent troops for peace keeping and to help rebuild the country
We do allow citizens visa-less entry into eachothers countries, we trade a fair bit with eachother and everything - so we are pretty friendly despite it all - So I guess if you wanted a small analogy, it's similar to the US/Canada thing?
He's got his publicity now, the pragmatic approach would be to comply with the court order. He can continue to fight the original order through the legal system, but to ignore it in this manner is only going to end one way.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
We're a different people. Please don't think that New Zealanders hate Australians. We don't. In fact, we like them better than any other nationality. It's a friendly rivalry, which manifests itself mostly in sports and in jokes hurled in both directions. Culturally, New Zealanders and Australians are more like each other than they are like anyone else. Any grievances are solely due to sports (Google underarm bowling incident, for example).
There are, however, a few political reasons why New Zealand will likely never merge with Australia. Australia has a more right wing political culture than New Zealand does. New Zealand tends to support the UN line on military interventions, while Australia is more pro US. New Zealand has also banned nuclear weapons, and that would have to go if there was a merger (trying to overturn the ban is somewhat of a third rail in NZ politics).
But the main problem would be the status of the Maori people of New Zealand. Maori have certain rights under treaty with the Crown, and no merger could ever occur unless the Australians recognized those rights. Australian Aboriginals have no such treaty rights, and a merger would create a dilemma because Aboriginal Australians would then have a basis to claim equivalent rights and there is no way the Australian public would go for that.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
New Zealand does have a Bill of Rights and it is entrenched law (from memory) but still modifiable by Parliament. (First they repeal the clause that contains the entrenchment and then do what they need to.)
Everything is always modifiable by Parliament.
We have no written constitution in the sense the US does. In fact, our constitutional law is written but it is spread all over the place. There is no constitutional court and no need for lawyers (in general) to argue about the wording of the constitution. This works well because those in power have to do the right thing instead of what they think they can get away with.
Parliament is responsible to the Governor-General as the Queen's representative. The G-G has supreme power on paper but is a figurehead for the vast majority of time. Occasionally the G-G has to act and do something like dissolve Parliament. This happened in Australia in the 1970's to Gough Whitlam's government.