Foreign Perspectives

Freedom of expression is one of those things that we kind of just assume we have in western societies but in reality there are generally limits to it.

For example, the issue of Madeline McCann is freely spoken about in Portugal yet in the UK a range of comments are censored. Joana on her own blogspot blog clearly is none too impressed about the British media on this one. After all, in Portugal the law states that

1. Everyone shall possess the right to freely express and publicise his thoughts in words, images or by any other means, as well as the right to inform others, inform himself and be informed without hindrance or discrimination.
2. Exercise of the said rights shall not be hindered or limited by any type or form of censorship.

Seems clear, doesn’t it? Well, the problem is that what that particular law doesn’t allow for is how individual publishers operate. After all, it is up to the publisher to decide whether or not to publish stuff on their site. What that law is saying that anyone can publish anything; it doesn’t say that an individual publisher is required to publish everything. After all, Joana moderates comments on her site: is that not the very same censorship that she accuses the British media of?

In America, the first amendment is similarly clear on freedom of expression in that it states

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

However, that’s been modified somewhat over the centuries and notably does NOT apply to commercial speech so, for example, it doesn’t allow all and sundry to send out junk mail to everyone. Having said that, the freedom of expression is taken very seriously and other laws and administrative procedures have had to change to allow for us, for example, full details of ongoing trials are published as they happen.

In theory Europe as a whole has a similar freedom of expression courtesy of the Human Rights Convention which states in Article 10:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In many respects this is an updating of the American first amendment, or at least the freedom of expression bits are. As always, lawmakers tack on seemingly unrelated clauses thus whilst we would see freedom of religion as being separate from freedom of expression, clearly in the 1700s the Americans didn’t. Likewise, the business about not restricting the licensing of broadcasting enterprises isn’t altogether appropriate these days with the likes of Youtube.

Interestingly though the second paragraph in clarifying this freedom does not list the prohibition of publication of current court proceedings as being one of those things that isn’t allowed as this does not appear to affect the “authority and impartiality” of the judiciary as shown by the American example. However, yet again that doesn’t mean that publishers are required to publish everything that comes their way, merely that they are allowed to do so if they wish to.

So where does that place our freedom of expression in the UK? Well, the Human Rights Convention is enacted in UK law. So, the publisher would be permitted to publish those comments of Joana but would not be required to do so. However, it does suggest that the action in taking down our own sites last week was NOT legal as our right of freedom of expression as per Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention would override the reporting restriction ie the contempt of court action was itself illegal.

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One major misconception that many people make is that last minute sites are only appropriate if you’re travelling locally but, of course, everywhere is local to somebody and naturally the last minute booking sites reflect that. Well, sometimes….

In fact, Last Minute in Australia has only recently revamped their site into a much more usable version which seems fully integrated as a proper Australian site now as opposed to being simply an offshoot of the UK one. Among other things that their last minute flights include the weirdly named airports such as Wagga Wagga (pronounced WOGGA according to my resident Australian) as well as those that would be more familiar in the rest of the world. That’s a big plus as you can built a flight itinerary that follows your requirements rather than those of the masses who generally know a mere handful of places in Australia.

Naturally, it’s not much use being able to turn up in Wagga Wagga if you can’t get a hotel to stay in. You might think that all sites would include hotels in the destinations that they fly to but that’s far from being always the case. The last minute hotels available on Last Minutes Australian site is a pleasant exception to that and had quite a good selection in all of the locations that I tried, even for tomorrow. That’s even including several pretty off-beat spots too.

Sadly heavy duty competition on flights hasn’t, so far, arrived in Australia but the first of the discount airlines have begun to open up with Virgin Blue having a growing number of routes undercutting the major airlines significantly.

Last Minute have made a very worthwhile update to this site which gives quite a comprehensive selection of travel options and good availability on them too.

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Somehow or other I managed to pick up 78% on the latest assignment which is pretty good going as initially I hadn’t a clue as to how to properly approach the semi-essay part of it.

It was quite a strange kind of assignment as it was largely based on the methodology book rather than the main course text. That dictated quite a different structure than the typical essay response ending up in the question being split between five short definitions and a longer piece on experimental ethics.

As always at degree level, the “definitions” required are quite complete ones with a full definition of each term in the question and examples to show that you actually understand it which, of course, wouldn’t be shown were you just to write out a straight dictionary style definition.

The ethics part was based around an experiment first carried out in the 1960s and replicated for the BBC/Open University series Child of Our Time a few years ago. Basically it involved kids looking at a video of an adult attacking a doll with three different endings to the video: the adult getting told off for his actions, getting rewarded for them and finally nothing happening to him. There are loads of ethical problems in reproducing an experiment like this, most obviously being that you already know that the kids will become more violent after watching the video (yes, folks, watching violent programming does affect them) you know ahead of time that you will be harming in this way.

Psychological experiments on children seem to be quite a minefield in terms of ethics. For instance, it would be really handy to be able to experiment on the effect of removing, say, the father from the family unit but clearly that’s not a runner ethically or morally and many other potential experiments are just as problematical. In these cases you can use what are called “natural experiments” where the conditions you’d liked to have had in your experiment have happened naturally. For example, if the father leaves naturally. However, even there you’ve problems as one assumes that how the family functioned prior to the divorce would be different than if the divorce hadn’t happened ie the “experiment” isn’t running entirely as one would ideally need it to run.

Still, a pleasing mark. Let’s hope that I can keep it up for the next assignment which I gotta get going on soon…

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