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Author Topic: "Free" Press? ... How free is The Press?  (Read 10913 times)
PatriotWarrior
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« on: September 14, 2004, 02:55:15 PM »

Britain recently led the cavalry against Zimbabwe’s new Media Act. But how does it square with Britain’s own Treason Felony Act of 1848, which threatens anyone advocating the downfall of the monarchy to be deported for the term of his or her natural life?

~~~~~~~~~~

If recent reports by the "international" media are to be believed, Zimbabwe is the only country to have thought about introducing a “draconian” law on access to information, protection of privacy and freedom of expression.

It is all very good that any attempt by any country to muzzle the media and free speech is attacked. But for the attack to be meaningful and noble, the critics themselves must not be doing the same thing in their own countries. In fact, they must have clean hands.

Sadly, in the case of Zimbabwe’s new bill, some of the critics, particularly Britain, did not, and do not, have clean hands.

For proof, you don’t have to look beyond the 6 December 2000 issue of The Guardian (London). On the front page of that day’s issue (reproduced here for easy reference), the paper reported:

“The Treason Felony Act 1848 ... threatens that anyone imagining or publishing anything which might lead to the Queen’s downfall should be deported for life.

“Today and over the next few days, this paper is running a number of articles advocating republicanism [in Britain], despite... [the] outdated statute, the Treason Felony Act 1848, which threatens anyone doing so with deportation for the term of his or her natural life.”


And then came the rub: “The paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger,” The Guardian revealed, “wrote last week to the attorney general, Lord Williams of Mostyn, asking for an assurance that he will not be prosecuted, given that he has no intention of advocating overthrow of the monarchy by force.

“In his letter, the editor argued that the Treason Felony Act breaches Article 10 of the European Convention, the right to freedom of expression.

“He suggested the attorney general might ask the high court to reinterpret the Treason Felony Act so that only calls to overthrow the monarchy by violence would be an offence. He offered the paper’s support in the application.


“Lord Williams replied:

‘I hope you understand that neither David Calvert-Smith [the director of public prosecutions] nor I can give you an assurance regarding whether or not a prosecution or other action will be taken. You are asking me to take action which sanctions in advance conduct which may be criminal. You should take your own legal advice, then decide for yourself whether you will follow it.’”

Lord Williams was writing in the year of our Lord 2000. His message was clear. The Treason Felony Act may be 153 years old, but you break it at your own peril.

So The Guardian, as obedient to the law as all the other sections of the British media, had to wait until Britain had incorporated the European Human Rights Act into its own law in October 2000, before daring to publish its series advocating republicanism (or the downfall of the monarchy).

“The Human Rights Act,” the paper even added for good measure, “gives UK judges power for the first time to reinterpret statutes to make them compatible 'so far as possible' with the European Convention.”

In effect, instead of going ahead to publish -- damn the consequences! -- (a huge lesson for African journalists), The Guardian hid behind the protection afforded by the European Convention before publishing the series. And this was in the year 2000! If it had published the articles before Britain incorporated the European Human Rights Act into its law, The Guardian and its editor could have been strung up, under the Treason Felony Act of 1848.

That was what the attorney general, Lord Williams, said in so many words. The director of public prosecutions, now knowing that the law is not on his side, has remained silent since the publication.

In fact, The Guardian did not wait for him or the attorney general to strike first. The best defence is to attack, so The Guardian took the fight to the two gentlemen, by going to court {!!} on 16 February 2001 to challenge the Treason Felony Act.

On that day, the paper reported: “The Guardian will make legal history today when it launches a high court challenge under the Human Rights Act to a 153-year-old law which threatens anyone calling in print for abolition of the monarchy with life imprisonment.

“The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger and columnist Polly Toynbee will file a claim at the high court in London today against the attorney general, Lord Williams of Mostyn, and the director of public prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith.

“The case is the first to be brought purely under the Human Rights Act since it came into force last October ... The claim alleges that the 1848 Treason Felony Act violates Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to free speech.


“Mr Rusbridger said: ‘The Treason Felony Act is one more piece of archaic legal nonsense surrounding the monarchy. People may say it’s meaningless, but meaningless laws are bad laws. Like the Act of Settlement, it’s about time it was scrapped!'”

The Act of Settlement 1701 “remains”, according to The Guardian, “the crucial cornerstone of the British constitution, exercising an extraordinary hold over the monarchy and imposing limitations designed to tackle the imperatives of a political crisis at the dawn of the 18th century. But it is scarcely relevant to the 21st.”

The 301-year-old Act “bans Roman Catholics and other non-Protestants from succession to the British throne.”

But despite concerns that the Act “clashes with the European Human Rights Act and thus be expunged from the UK’s statute book,” the law is still in force …

And it still bans British MPs from debating “the conduct of the sovereign, the heir to the throne or other members of the royal family. An MP who raised the question of whether Britain might be better off as a republic could be sent to the Tower of London,” reported The Guardian on 6 December 2000.

‘Saint’-land is not saintly after all.

Quote
An MP who raised the question of whether Britain might be better off as a *republic* could be sent to the Tower of London.


~~~~~~~~~~

“Why bother to muzzle sheep?”

“Publish and be damned" appears to be the foundation stone of African journalism. “National security” and "national interest" ... Huh … Never heard of it! Yet, the reverse is true in Western journalism. As a lesson to us all in Afrika (both journalists and non-journalists), here is a selection of what British journalists themselves have written about their own media laws, and the Western media's attitude to the interests of their countries and governments: ...

Andrew Grice, The Independent, 3 January 2002:

The official watchdog on freedom of information [in Britain] has accused the government of becoming more secretive despite its repeated public pledges to bring in more openness.

Sir Michael Buckley, the parliamentary ombudsman, who monitors the government’s code of practice on access to official information, said: “We have noticed a tendency for departments to take a harder line and be less cooperative. It is fairly uphill work with departments.”

He also criticised the cabinet’s decision to delay the introduction of its much-heralded Freedom of Information Act from next summer until 2005.

Hugh Stephenson, Index on Censorship, June 1997:

There are some 50 major pieces of legislation on the statute book in the UK whose effect, expressly or in practice, is to gag journalists … (see end of this article). The latest example is the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act. In time, this could become a partial and backdoor Protection of Privacy Act.

A cloud much larger than a man’s hand hangs over the media in the shape of next year’s Data Protection Bill, designed to implement, by 1998, the corresponding EU directive.

The bill would turn the present Data Protection Registrar into a Commissioner with new powers to require those holding data to inform the individuals concerned what data is being held about them and why; and to introduce safeguards -- like an obligation to obtain prior consent over the use of sensitive personal information -- with wider compensation for those who can show that the regulations have been broken in their case.

In its present form, the legislation would signal the end of any kind of investigative journalism in the UK.

Moyra Grant, Serendipity website, 1998:

How free are the press and broadcasting media in Britain? The external constraints are quite well known -- though their range and scope may not be ... Other legislative constraints include the Official Secrets Acts, Prevention of Terrorism Act, Police and Criminal Evidence Act, Contempt of Court Act, and laws relating to obscenity, libel, race relations, sedition, incitement to disaffection and treason  -- amongst others.

To these can be added the many instances of direct government censorship -- notably during the Falklands and Gulf conflicts -- and the informal but sometimes intense pressures of advertisers and distributors.

The most insidious form of political control on the media, however, is not external constraint but self-censorship ... The most institutionalised method of self-censorship is the D-Notice (short for Defence Notice). It is a unique peacetime arrangement of voluntary suppression of certain categories of information on the advice -- not orders -- of the government.

The system was established in 1912 and continues to this day ... It is strongly requested that there should be no elaboration, nor confirmation or denial, of the accuracy of items published elsewhere, without reference to the [D-Notice] secretary.

There are currently eight general kinds of D-Notices (which, incidentally, used to be secret information themselves, but were made public in 1982):

  • Defence plans, operational capability, state of readiness and training.
  • Defence equipment.
  • Nuclear weapons and equipment.
  • Radio and radar transmissions.
  • Ciphers and communications.
  • British security and intelligence services.
  • War precautions and civil defence.
  • Photography etc of defence establishments and installations.

When in the 1980s Granada TV made a documentary about the Official Secrets Acts, the D-Notice Committee asked them to exclude the [postal] address of the Government’s Communications Headquarters (CGHQ) [the listening station] in Cheltenham. Granada objected, because the address was already in Whitaker’s Almanac and other registers and was therefore public knowledge.

However, the IBA -- the body which then allocated broadcasting franchises and monitored commercial programmes -- intervened and ordered Granada to cut the reference out of the programme.

The D-Notices are sent out to national and provincial newspaper editors, radio and TV companies, and to some publishers of books and periodicals.

When editors know that certain information falls under a particular D-Notice, they simply exclude it; when they are uncertain, they may seek advice.


The secretary of the D-Notice Committee [the current secretary is Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson] receives on average one phone call a week from editors seeking guidance on potentially sensitive material; he gives positive advice NOT to publish about a dozen times a year.

More often, editors err on the side of caution and omit dubious information without consulting anyone.

As Ernest Bevin once said in a cabinet debate on media censorship: “Why bother to muzzle sheep?”



Felicity Lawrence & Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, 27 January 2000:

Until 1992, about 50 sites in Britain were covered by D-Notices, a voluntary system of self-censorship whereby editors agree not to publish information about subjects relating to defence and the activities of the security and intelligence agencies.

Paul O'Connor, Index on Censorship, May 1998:

In Britain, reporting the news [that] the mainstream media ignores is fast becoming a ticket to the cells

Dressed in a white paper suit and little else, documentary maker Ben Edwards blinked as the early sun rose over the police station in Plymouth. It was the end of his 24-hour stint in a small cell; his video camera and tapes were now in the hands of the police. Just another statistic in the growing number of journalists in Britain arrested in the line of duty.

For three months, Edwards had been documenting the direct-action protests against the test sites of genetically modified (GM) crops  up and down the country. Activists have destroyed over two-thirds of all GM test crops growing in the open air.

Edwards had been given exclusive access by the activists to report their actions as they trashed a GM site near Totnes in Devon on 3 August 1998.

However, the police were tipped off and duly arrested all the activists, along with Edwards, despite his credentials as a journalist. While he was locked up, police raided his home and seized his computer, a number of video tapes and written material.

The police crackdown on news-gathering goes beyond stifling GM protests. A few weeks prior to the Devon arrests, a journalist reporting for the Daily Mail was arrested in Ayrshire merely for knocking on a door.

He was enquiring about a secret meeting of hugely influential capitalists known as the Bilderberg Group … A journalist of eight years, Campbell Thomas, 34, is also a special constable and his initial disbelief at his arrest for breach of the peace was followed by five hours in a filthy cell ...

Television reporter Roddy Mansfield came up against the Metropolitan Police while filming a protest against Rank Leisure Ltd. He showed his NUJ [National Union of Journalists] press card but couldn’t remember the card’s PIN. Mansfield was arrested for “forging a press card”! All charges were later dropped.

Since that incident, he feels he has been singled out for harassment by the police, had his camera smashed, been arrested six times and, in May last year [1997], The Met [… or the London police] erased all his camera footage in front of him in the custody suite of Belgravia police station ...

Photographer Nick Cobbing was one of a few journalists convicted and fined for obstructing a bailiff despite the courts recognising him as a working reporter. He was arrested during the Manchester airport protests while working in the trees ...

More worrying is the case of video journalist Gerard O'Sullivan who was arrested in April [1998] while reporting at a vivisection protest in Oxfordshire. He has the dubious honour of becoming the first journalist to be charged under the Protection from Harassment Act.

Kim Sengupta, The Independent, 27 September 2001:

The British media have been warned to minimise speculation on forthcoming military activity [in Afghanistan] for fear that some reports could be of use to the enemy.

A letter sent by the D-Notice Committee, the independent body based at the Ministry of Defence, reflects the government’s concern about newspaper, television and radio reports of the military options available.

Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson, the secretary to the Committee, said in the letter:

"As the next phase of military and intelligence planning and action now gets underway ... informed speculation may become very close to the truth. It would be operationally very helpful, therefore, and a reassurance to those who may be going into action in the coming days or months, if editors could now minimise such speculation, whether by their own journalists or by retired military people.”

The Committee’s note came after Downing Street urged the media yesterday to be “responsible” and not to spread “undue personal alarm.”

Rear-Admiral Wilkinson said: “We are reaching a stage in time now when we have to be careful … I am not here to stop stories, just to ask people to be careful and to point out that the mechanism is in place to make check, if necessary.”

The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee (the formal title of the D-Notice Committee), which advises the media on national security, consists of 13 media representatives and four senior civil servants. It is based at the MoD [ministry of defence] building in Whitehall [the government district in central London].

Louise Jury, The Independent, 15 October 2001:

It would be wrong to say there is no cooperation between the press and government. At least 17 media organisations are understood to have known that the American government was going to begin bombing Afghanistan three days before the attacks began, and none reported it.

For all its old-fashioned sense of a gentleman’s agreement, journalists still sit with the military on the D-Notice Committee which, at the end of September, issued a request to editors and broadcasters to “minimise speculation” about forthcoming military action in Afghanistan.

Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 17 Oct 2001:

The friction is growing as the British media are asked to impose tighter secrecy and privacy rules upon themselves than others. To try and calm domestic nerves, Downing Street [Tony Blair’s office] has also been urging newspapers not to promote the anthrax threat.

Anthony Howard, The Times, 2 October 2001:

Worse, in some ways, has been the role some papers have adopted in trying to make our flesh creep [with] germ warfare stories, taking in everything from anthrax through smallpox and cholera to plague.

Out of consideration for national morale, I do not believe any such material would ever have surfaced in the national press between 1939 and 1945. But then, of course, we really were at war, and this time we have merely been living through an ersatz version of war hysteria.

Michael Griffin, Index on Censorship, May 1998:

For all its talk of greater transparency and accountability, the European Union has done little to honour those promises. Brussels is more given to withholding than releasing information and hounds journalists who try to get the story. Meanwhile, in the UK, a government that campaigned on the promise of freedom of information now threatens our right to know.

Richard Beeston, diplomatic editor, The Times, in a speech to a media conference at Taplow, UK June 2001:

“The British media report into a box [of pre-set ideas]. The story must therefore fit the box, or be made to fit the box, or get thrown out.”

George Alagiah, BBC correspondent and news anchor, in a speech to a media conference in London, May 1998:

“Template [or box] reporting implies that there is a formulaic way of reporting, It conveys an impression that there are a set number of ingredients, and all a reporter does is turn up in a disaster zone and pick this thing off the shelf and he or she has the humanitarian story, the template story.

“And the ingredients, well, most of us know them practically off by heart. You’ve got to have the emaciated child, preferably crying, you've got to have a feeding centre where mothers with shrunken breasts are trying to calm their children, you’ve got to have an aid worker, usually white, usually a woman, who is working against the odds and yet has the time to come and tell us, the reporter and the audience, how difficult it all is; and you have a breathless and shocked reporter saying how awful the whole thing is. And that is supposed to be the template report.”


Robert Fisk, The Independent, 3 Sept 2001:

Just as the BBC last month ordered its reporters to use the phrase “targeted killings” for Israel’s assassination of Palestinians, CNN -- under constant attack from right-wing Jewish pro-settler lobby groups -- has instructed its journalists to stop referring to Gilo as a “Jewish settlement”; instead, they must call the settlement, built illegally on occupied Arab land outside Jerusalem, a “Jewish neighbourhood.” …

The instruction from CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta is straightforward: "We refer to Gilo as a Jewish neighbourhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, built on land occupied by Israel in 1967. We don't refer to it as a settlement.”

In the past, CNN used “terrorist” only about Arabs -- the Israeli settler who murdered 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994 was always called an "extremist" on CNN -- and at one point described Arab protests at the illegal settlements built by Jews on Palestinian land as “conflicting heritage” claims.

A CNN spokesman in Atlanta said last night: "We have no response to make to you. We don't want to get into a discussion on this. In fact we'd rather not say anything about this at all."

Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, 18 May 2000:

National security, a nebulous concept at the best of times, covers a multitude of sins. Under New Labour [Tony Blair], just how the secret police -- (MI5's foot soldiers) -- treat those who want to tell the real truth, has been more than amply demonstrated.

Tony Geraghty last year became the first journalist to be charged under the Official Secrets Act [in 1999]. His alleged crime was to have written a book in which he reveals the extent of the army's surveillance operations and M15 dirty tricks in Northern Ireland.

He describes in The Irish War how many computer systems provide total cover of a largely innocent population. Charges against Geraghty have been dropped but one of his alleged contacts, Colonel Nigel Wylde, still faces the prospect of a criminal trial ...

“Martin Ingram” is the pseudonym of a former member of the army’s “force research unit”. A man accused of being Ingram has been arrested under the Official Secrets Act, his house has been burgled and a manuscript of a book he was writing went missing.

The manuscript turned up a few days later in the hands of the prosecution at a court hearing, when government lawyers obtained an injunction preventing him from publishing his book.

The Ministry of Defence has also obtained an injunction preventing The Sunday Times from publishing his information. Liam Clarke, the newspaper's Northern Ireland editor, now faces the prospect of being arrested under the Official Secrets Act. He has been summoned by the police Special Branch and advised to bring a lawyer with him.

The police want to question him, not about the truth behind the allegations of wrongdoing by army intelligence officers, but for revealing the allegations.

Robert Fisk, The Independent, 8 Nov 2001:

"Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign” -- merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MIGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s.

"Coalition"? Hands up who's seen the Lufttwaffe in the skies over Kandahar; or the Italian air force or the French air force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed …

Then there's the “war on terror”. When are we moving to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya? …

So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbitting on about the "air campaign", "coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle? …

Infinitely more shameful -- and unethical -- were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said: "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5, 000 innocent people."

Is Mr Isaacson just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by the White House press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do"?

Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US government's demand not to broadcast Bin Laden's words in toto, lest they contain "coded messages". But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air campaign", "coalition forces" and "war on terror".

Peregrine Worsthorne, The Guardian, *9 Sept 2001*:

I suspect the secret agendas -- political, diplomatic and commercial -- in the media today are much more complex and potentially sinister, and therefore more in need of exposure, than any of those to which we became accustomed during the Cold War years. Then it was all relatively aboveboard. Pretty well the entire media could be relied upon, to a greater or lesser extent, and with more or less enthusiasm, to report and comment from a basic standpoint that was pro-American and anti-communist.

No doubt each title had its own hidden agendas: fellow-travelling sympathies on the left and Cold War hysteria on the right. But no hidden agenda -- proprietorial, editorial or commercial -- was remotely as significant or as compelling as the overall basic ideological commitment to winning the Cold War. So to that extent, the reader knew where the papers stood.

But nowadays, there is not even that degree of certainty. The right-wing press [in Britain], largely owned by two North Americans, is still as uncritically pro-American as it was in the Cold War. But whereas we knew then that their motives were respectable and patriotic, now we can have no such certainties. All kinds of military-industrial corporate agendas could also be in play, as they quite certainly are in The Times' coverage of China and the Far East.


Hugo Young, The Guardian, 17 January 2002:

Mr Kenneth Roth [the executive director of the US-based Human Rights Watch, HRW] likened the military tribunals President Bush has announced to those of a tin-pot tyrant wanting to get rid of his political enemies -- which, in another life, Washington would be the first to condemn.

But HRW is not the mainstream. The mainstream all flows in one acquiescent direction. Searching The New York Times and The Washington Post websites, I can find neither an editorial nor a column that criticised the regime [Donald Rumsfeld -- the US defence secretary -- approves for Camp X-ray (at Guantanamo Bay)].

The rights and wrongs are barely discussed. Here is a considerable issue of principle, staked out by a president in seeming defiance of international conventions, which the big US papers would normally be full of. Instead, it succumbs to the fog of loyalty that has choked the oxygen out of controversy in the citadels of the US media ever since September 11.

Tom Walker, diplomatic correspondent, The Times, in a contribution to a media conference in London, June 2001:

I’m very often asked to investigate Mugabe's bank accounts and things like that, and it’s just not possible to do that, but there's tremendous pressure on journalists to approach it from that sort of angle.

There’s just not enough analysis of the black-on-black problem in Zimbabwe, and the white problem has been blown out of all proportion because certainly when you compare the number of whites killed in Zimbabwe with the number of whites killed in South Africa, it's extremely small.


Liz McGregor, deputy comment editor, The Guardian, in a contribution to a media conference in London, June 2001:

In countries with a large white population like Zimbabwe and South Africa, there is a lot more interest [by the Western media], and I think this is largely because the newspapers are white-run and white-owned, and they are trying to identify with people who look like them.

A lot of their view is skewed by the fact that they are white-owned newspapers, and a lot of them follow Britain's commercial interests.

One of the reasons why there is not a lot of interest in Congo is that there is not a big white party involved.


Colette Braeckman, the Congo expert of the Belgian daily, Le Soir, in a speech to a media conference in London, June 2001:

During the Congo crisis, you had the bad guy, Laurent Kabila. It is easy to go back and find how many stories demonise him -- some with good reason, some bad, but all exaggerated.

The world community wanted to get rid of Kabila for so many reasons, also for reasons of economic interest, and people closed their eyes to what was really going on.

When Kabila came to Belgium, we had a briefing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which said that the Belgians were not ready to give him a red carpet treatment, so the media were influenced enough to demonise him, and I wonder if that happens in other countries too.

I wonder who sets the agenda, it’s not just the press. The political leaders say this is a good guy, this is a bad guy ... At the moment, Joseph Kabila -- [son of Laurent] -- is a good guy, but maybe tomorrow he would be a bad guy …

Robert Fisk, The Independent, 17 April 2001:

In February, Newsweek propagated a virtual fraud on its cover by showing -- under the headline “Terror Goes Global – Exclusive: Bin Laden's International Network” -- a frightening photograph of a man (head and shoulders), his face covered in an Arab scarf, holding a rifle in his right hand.

The reader would imagine this to be a member of Osama bin Laden's network of "global terror". [Note: Fisk was writing in April 2001, five whole months before September 11].

But I traced the Finnish photographer who took this picture. He snapped it at a funeral on the West Bank. The man was an armed member of the Palestinian Tanzim militia -- and had nothing to do with Bin Laden !! …

The Tanzim are violent enough. But the [Newsweek] cover generically smeared the entire Palestinian people by associating them with the man supposedly responsible for bombing US embassies in Africa.

We [journalists], too, have done this. Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" -- the most loathsome of libels against any journalist -- means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East.

Maybe we should look up the cuttings of the apartheid era and remember when men were NOT without honour.

~~~~~~~~~~

The 50 pieces of UK law gagging journalists:

  • Administration of Justice Act 1960
  • Adoption Act 1976
  • Air Force Act 1955
  • Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919
  • Army Act 1955
  • Broadcasting Act 1990
  • Children Act 1989
  • Children and Young Persons Acts 1933,1963,1969
  • Civil Service Reform Act 1978
  • Contempt of Court Act 1981
  • Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
  • Criminal Justice Acts 1925, 1987, 1988, 1995
  • Customs Consolidation Act 1876
  • Data-Protection Act 1984
  • Defamation Acts 1952,1996
  • Domestic and Appellate Proceedings (Restriction of Publicity) Act 1968
  • Family Law Act 1986
  • Financial Services Act 1986
  • Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981
  • Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934
  • Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981
  • Interception of Communications Act 1985
  • Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act 1926
  • Magistrate Courts Act 1980
  • Magistrates Courts (NI) Order 1981
  • Matrimonial Causes Act 1980
  • Naval Discipline Act 1957
  • Northern Ireland (Emergency Powers) Act 1975
  • Obscene Publications Act 1959
  • Official Secrets Acts 1911, 1920, 1938, 1989
  • Police Act 1964
  • Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
  • Prevention of Corruption Act 1906
  • Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provision) Act 1989
  • Protection of Harassment Act 1997
  • Public Order Act 1986
  • Race Relations Act 1976
  • Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974
  • Representation of the People Act 1983
  • Sexual Offences Act 1956
  • Sexual Offences (Amendment) Acts 1976,1992
  • Telecommunications Act 1984
  • Theft Act 1968
  • Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act 1993
  • Tribunals of Enquiry (Evidence) Act 1921
  • Unsolicited Goods and Services Act 1971
  • Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949
  • Treason Felony Act 1848
  • Act of Settlement 1701
  • Criminal Law Act 1967

© Copyright New African; March 2002.
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