Thread:Comments:Scottish Justice Secretary 'acutely aware of unusual publicity' in Kular case/UK & Commonwealth tradition v. US laws/reply (5)

Well I wrote this, so I'm going to give my take on the issue.

1) My understanding of libel tourism laws in the US is that it applies to civil law, not criminal. In any event they are a direct attempt to circumvent the laws of other sovereign nations, which raises a can of worms if opposing jurisdictions get into a war with no prospect of an end. If nobody from the UK touched this article, we'd have the legal ability to publish; see my next point.

2) I doubt very highly we'd be having this conversation about naming a rape victim if that were legal in the states. Catholic secrecy means we still get revelations going back decades. UK contempt legislation means we wait until after a trial. To my European mind, the trial-by-media available throughout the States can, in the case of a jury trial, come nowhere close to a fair trial. Wikinews has had ethics debates in the past and the appetite is generally to apply what we in the UK might call "the public interest test" (I use quote marks because the exact phrase is actually used in other, irrelevant, legislation). Can there be any public interest in tainting a jury pool? How hard is it to wait for a trial? This isn't a nation where trials take place many years later.

3) Not really. Well. We have done in the past; Syrian citizen journalists risk death, targeted; city of Homs facing starvation Here we have an article where the person we talked to could have been extra-judicially killed just for speaking to us. That's a fairer parallel to a Mexican cartel investigation.