> English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright.
Counterpoint: when the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, people can lie about terrible things with little to no consequence.
I personally have been at the receiving end of some particularly heinous lies by an individual who is unfortunately not getting the mental assistance they need. It was hard enough to secure a restraining order but my lawyer said there was pretty much nothing I could do about the whoppers being blasted over social media. Fortunately nobody believed the crazy person’s crazy lies but if they had I could have been put in a really bad situation.
I think they have sufficient evidence to win the suit in the US. From the court:
The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
Most likely not. There are two parts of US case law that would be at issue here, but the key is actual malice [1]. The defendants here believed the claims they were repeating, even if they themselves hadn't seen the evidence. That isn't defamation.
"actual malice" means either they knew it was untrue or they published it with reckless disregard for the truth. That would be the test he would attempt to prove they failed.
Actual malice (which, reckless disregard isn't all that hard to get) it's only required if a person is a public figure. For most people, you only have to show negligence.
> > British defamation law is notoriously friendly to plaintiffs.
> English defamation law... does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood.
That's not 'notoriously friendly to plaintiffs'. It's simply reasonable behaviour: if someone says something horrible about someone else, the person saying it must be able to prove it was true.
It is completely unreasonable that you are not allowed to speak factually about events that you personally experienced simply because you are not able to conclusively prove that they happened.
The UK's system required a historian to spend two years and millions defending against a libel claim from calling someone a prominent Holocaust denier a Holocaust denier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd
That's to argue one of the most clearly documented historical facts we have.
Allegations - testimony - are evidence. Multiple people alledging something is evidence. Even under US libel law, accusing someone like Cosby or Weinstein of misconduct is risky enough; in the UK, it led to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile being untouchable.
Nothing you have written refutes the item you have quoted. Someone was able to prove that David Irving said the holocaust did not happen, but it did happen, and David Irving lost. Good. The court being slow and expensive is orthogonal and applies across all of law.
This is the absolute best case scenario - the easiest of wins, on a factual level - and it was still hugely expensive in time and money. (He went bankrupt, too, so they didn't even get to recoup those fees.)
If you're one of the kids Jimmy Savile raped, do you think they've got those resources to fight a multi-year court battle with someone who's been covering their tracks successfully for over sixty years? The BBC won't risk talking about it, what hope do you have?
Note that once he died and libel suits couldn't be raised any longer, hundreds of victims came out within the year.
It's a big part of why Jimmy Savile got away with it despite everyone apparently knowing what he was up to, nobody wanted to run the story because they anticipated it would get shot down as libel. The BBC greenlit an investigation into the allegations immediately after he died, they knew full well there was dirt there but they wouldn't touch it until he was in the ground.
Agreed. I know absolutely nothing about this particular case so I'm not passing judgement on it specifically. But as a British person I've learned over the years (and the endless court cases by football players etc) to pretty much totally disregard the outcome of these kind of cases.
Well in the case of defamation the damage has already been done, necessarily. So the defendant is really a prosector, and they are asked for their evidence. See,
eg., this case.
Also,...
> The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
> English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright.