DEFAMATORY LIBEL.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 13421, 23 October 1905, Page 4

DEFAMATORY LIBEL.

The resistance which was offered by the Opposition • to the Criminal Code Act. Amendment Mill on Thursday night and ali through Friday last has had a very valuable effect. The measure as brought down by the Government contemplated a gross interference with private liberties —an interference that was not the lesg objectionable because it was proposed in the sacred-name of Liberalism. We see no reason whatever why the

individual who deliberately employs the public platform to dofame our public men should be spared. 'If lie is a man of substance he is, of course, liable to bo called upon to answer through ths ciril courts for the slanders ho publishes. But it is certainly necessary that some check should be imposed by law upon tho utterances of persons who, in popular terms, are "not worth powder and shot." These individuals are, by reason of their very impecuniousness, exempt from the risks of civil prosecution, while if they are, as sometimes happens, as bankrupt in reputation as in pocket, they belong to the precise class of creatures who would be prepared, for a consideration, to lend themselves to the dissemination of malicious libels. It is only reasonable that persons of this stamp should be rendered amenable to the law. As a civil prosecution hns no terrors for tlieln, it is really desirable that the scope of the criminal law should be extended so as to render the offence they commit liable to punishment in a suitable way. The Government was not content, however, in the Bill it attempted to force through the House last week, to legislate against the impecunious slanderer who deliberately and of set purposes Utters his libels in public meetings. The proposal was much more drastic than that. Its object, which may sound innocent enough on the surface, was to make defamatory libel by speech liable to punishment in the same way as a printed or written defamatory libel is punishable. In reality, the effect would have been to curtail very seriously the liberty of speecli which the community enjoys. Defamatory libel is defined by law as matter published without legal justification or excuse, either designed to insult any person or likely to injure his reputation by exposing him to hatred, contempt, or ridicule, or likely to injure him iu his profession or trade. Now, if the Bill, to which such stubborn opposition was offered last- week by members who are sometimes represented as enemies to progress, had been passed in the form desired by the Government, a person would have exposed himself to the risk of a criminal prosecution, with a liability to imprisonment for 12 months, for the careless use of a slanderous expression in the course of a conversation in the street, and if the defamatory statement should be one which he knew to be false the punishment might be increased to two years' imprisonment. That would have been a monstrous thing. The Minister of Justice sought to defend it by asserting that it was the law iu some of the colonies. The law of most countries recognisos, however, a clear distinction between the written or printed and tho spoken word. A person may be tempted, under stress of excitement or in the heat of argument, to use a hasty and unguarded expression which he may, upon reflection, deeply regret. But under the proposal submitted by the Government to Parliament, he would have been liable to be criminally prosecuted for his unpremeditated words, if the definition of defamatory libel could be stretched to cover them. The written or printed libel occupies a 'very different footing. The defamatory words are deliberately penned in the first instance, and they may remain on record, in the second place, in either the letter or the printed matter, a permanent libel upon the person to whom they refer; The modification of the Government measure, to which Mr 51a sscy and the other opponents of the original Bill have agreed, stil! fails to discriminate between the spoken and the written libel, and fixes the same maximum punishment for the one as for the other. But, inasmuch as it provides that the defamatory words, to render the person speaking them liable to a criminal prosecution, must either be uttered at a meeting to which the public is invited, or, if not used at a meeting, within the hearing of at least 20 persons in a public place, and as other safeguards are provided, the probabilities of its being successfully employed in what we should regard as an illegitimate way are fairly remote. The Bill has, through the exertions of the Opposition, been purged of the most objectionable features it presented in its original form. It would, as we have said, have made it dangerous for a person to express himself freely in a conversation in the street, for a publication to one person other than the person defamed would have been sufficient to admit of the criminal law being invoked. It mighteven have exposed a man to the risk of prosecution and the liability of imprisonment for speaking warmly m his own house respecting the actions and affairs of a person who might be the subject of conversation. The Bill, it will bo rccoguised, was a distinctly illiberal measure in this respect, and the members who opposed it rendered good service to the community in securing a modification of its terms,