Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Whilst we all diplore the blatent censorship of the Internet by the Chinese authorities, it would appear that the UK legal system wishes that it could do exactly the same thing in order to properly implement its practice of “reporting restrictions”.

In fact, it has already had such a system of censorship in effect back in 2006 when the New York Times felt it prudent to follow the reporting restrictions issued for a trial then underway. Thus, everywhere else in the world except in the UK the article in question could be read. Or, at least that was the intention. As always on the Internet there are ways around such things and accessing the site through an online proxy let anyone in the UK read the article.

At any one time there are a number of cases affected by these reporting restrictions which are intended to avoid the publication of information which could prejudice the outcome of the trial in question or to protect the names of the people involved in the trial. In addition to specific reporting restrictions there are more general restrictions regarding, for example, reporting of the names of children. These practices date back centuries and clearly a hundred or more years ago stopping the publication of information in the various newspapers of the time was quite effective in ensuring that the jurors did not have access to information about the case outside the courtroom. However, things have moved on somewhat in the intervening centuries.

Up to 10 or 15 years ago one could easily read information about the higher profile cases in foreign newspapers even when reporting on them had been banned by the UK legal system although notably the New York Times did not distribute the issue of the paper noted above in the UK. However, as Steven Bates pointed out back in 1995 the only truly effective way of implementing them would be to unhook the UK from the Internet. Worryingly, as China has shown this is now a potentially viable option but one hopes that it will never be considered as such by the UK.

Although there are presumably instances of even the smallest trial being reported on over the Internet the effect is most noticeable with high profile cases. The snag with those is that often the opinions expressed are very highly charged and thus potentially very prejudicial to the outcome of a trial were jurors to have come across some of them. At least two trials have already come to grief courtesy of independent Internet research by jurors and no doubt there will be more whilst the current “jurors must be ignorant” approach remains in place.

However, although the Internet has brought to prominance the possibility of jurors researching a case themselves in fact they have been able to do that for a considerable period of time already. Libraries contain exactly the kind of background information in the form of archived newspapers that the courts would wish banned from the Internet once a court issues a reporting restriction order. The snag is that the Internet has a much higher profile than the libraries ever did and is, of course, much more accessible. Combine that with the fact that even deleted articles are available courtesy of googles caching and you have the problem that once anything is published, it stays published.

But, there is no reason why that presumption of the ignorance of jurors should be retained. After all, the American legal system seems to operate quite well without it. Granted it will require changes in the British legal system to allow the dropping of this mechanism of reporting restrictions but surely the increased public visibility of the operation of the courts that would follow can only be a good thing?

One suspects that it will be quite some time before the British courts go so far as those in Arizona and permit the jurors to ask questions but it seems high time that they accepted that jurors are likely to have seen something about the case before the trial and allow for that.

With summer approaching fast I thought I’d give my new theme a whirl and use any feedback to tidy it up a little before releasing it on an unsuspecting world.

This is the theme I was working on off and on throughout last year. It’s got oodles of options on it so I’ll likely be playing around with some of them in the coming weeks but, so far, seems pretty workable with the current settings (I’ve been using it on some other blogs for several months now).

Big pluses are that it’s fully widget enabled so no more hunting around for missing things that always seems to happen when you change a theme. Also, it’s very easy to change from a full splash background to a plain and simple one.

Now, all I need to do is talk Wendy into using it on her blogs too to simplify looking after them all…

Having started to move more seriously onto Twitter a short while ago it’s interesting to see that using the keyword approach to find people is working rather unexpectedly well and I’m finding people that I’ve run across via their blogs already.

Which raises an issue… I really should change my Twitter name to match the blog but the problem is that “ForeignPerspectives” is 19 letters and Twitter only allows 15… more mulling over required as I don’t like any of the alternatives that I’ve come up with yet (suggestions welcome!).

I’d thought originally that this change would mess me up and it implies on the Twitter screen that it would but by coincidence somebody in Belfast I’m following has done just that and it seems not to make any difference in terms of the followers that you already have. That said, it seems best to make the change early on in my Twitter life before a whole heap of people need to start remembering a different name.

Although I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, I hadn’t really done anything with it ’til last week.

Simple reason for that really: Twitter lets you type up to 140 characters in a message and I’m very much a long winded kind of person as y’all will know by now. Also, I knew diddly about promoting myself on Twitter so had next to no followers ie I was effectively talking to myself.

However, last week I took another look at it and found a neat way of bumping up the number of followers (Twollo)  and also found that I could add Twitter to sociable on the blog. The first gave me a way of gathering followers whilst the second meant that I could do a short tweet with a link to a more lengthy blog article and together these overcame my issues with not using Twitter.

Twollo is a slightly odd application to use. What it does is let you put in words and automatically follow those that are using them, the theory being that quite a lot of the people who you follow will follow you back thus building up your followers. It kicks in surprisingly quickly too and I picked up over 400 followers within a matter of days. It is a little odd though as you need to use words that people use within their tweets rather than actual subject so, for example, although there are lots of expats tweeting  few use the word “expat” in their tweets so they don’t appear a lot in my followers.

One other problem with it is that you quickly get to the point where you’re following 2000 people which is the initial limit. That’s solveable though Twitter Karma which lets you remove those who’ve not followed you back: all you need to do is to sit back ’til you hit 2000 then run it. You can follow more than 2000 but it needs to be balanced with followers eg with 2000 followers you can follow 2000 plus 10% ie 2200, once you hit the 2200 you can add another 10% and so on.

My initial experiments at reposting some blog posts via Twitter seem to be working in that they’re pulling a lot of new readers to the blog posts (click-through is around 5% at the moment). In theory I could repost the whole lot but in practice my current thinking is that I’ll repost the reference style ones from OurInns, some of which have already been picked up by other tweeters.

So a good start I think with a whole bunch of new readers.

As y’all may have noticed of late, this blog is in the midst of yet another change of focus.

Originally, it started life way back in February 2004 as a means of keeping in touch with the folks back home when we were getting going on our life in France as from April that year all under the tagline of “Life in France without a TV crew”. That went great ’til we found ourselves in the position of being pretty much settled into life here, or at least settled in terms of not having anything much new to say about it. Net effect was that the writing fizzled out by late 2005.

Then I figured that what was needed to get me going again was a change of focus to an expat blog with a tagline of “Travel, expat life and foreign politics. As featured on TV and seen on Reuters.” as from the summer of 2006. Featured on TV? Well, funnily enough, the blog was the lead headline all day following the announcement of Chirac’s resignation. Articles from it are picked up fairly regularly by Reuters too although I’ve yet to work out exactly why!

However, now that we find ourselves in the midst of a partial relocation back to the UK (more on that anon), the focus is changing yet again. This time around I’ll be talking of our re-integration into the UK administration along with the continuing saga of my education and no doubt a whole bunch of other stuff along the way.