John Walker's Electronic House

At the centre of so many of the current super-injunctions and and brain-meltingly bizarre libel decisions in UK courts is one judge, Mr Justice Eady. In my previous post I asked whether anyone knew whether he was the judge behind the Trafigura rulings. As it turns out, he was not. A fact that surprised the Guardian’s George Monbiot as much as it did me, as he explains in a fantastic piece about this man whose decisions have been described by appeal court judges as, “plainly wrong”, “legally erroneous” and have earned comparisons with the Communist party censors in the Soviet Union.

Eady, Monbiot explains, is a force behind the existence of libel tourism in this country, and a huge part of the reason why courts in other countries are creating new laws to protect their citizens from his potential rulings.

So often you hear stupid, loud people screeching about “free speech” and how theirs is being taken from them. Inevitably they’re being given absolute freedom to scream this with no one trying to stop them, and indeed are only spurting their self-important idiocy because they saw someone else disagreeing with them. But in this case the actions of the UK libel courts are a genuine example of free speech being at risk, and indeed completely denied.

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