Human rights court rebukes England for gagging the press
The idea that individuals have rights that government should not infringe was an article of faith with "freeborn Englishmen" as far back as 1215, when a group of barons sat King John down to sign the Magna Carta. So there was considerable irony in the fact that an international court, born out of the Holocaust to prevent the rise of another Nazi Germany, solemnly declared last week that Great Britain had failed a basic test of human rights. Free expression, ruled the 20-judge European Court of Human Rights, had been denied by a longstanding English law that stifled the press and allowed a national scandal to go virtually unreported for a decade.
The scandal started in 1958 when Distillers Co., a huge British conglomerate known best for selling Scotch and gin, heavily advertised and sold a dangerous tranquilizer, Thalidomide, without adequately testing its effect on pregnant women. Before Distillers finally pulled the drug off the market, in 1961, some 450 tragically deformed babies were born in England, with flippers instead of arms and legs, or no limbs at all.
The government never investigated the calamity. Antiquated British laws made it difficult for victimized families to sue Distillers; the more than 350 who did were provided with lawyers who, in many cases, knew next to nothing about personal injury cases. Because of the law's delay and Distillers' refusal to offer more than niggardly settlements to the victims, the case dragged on into the '70s. All the while, the British press was banned from saying anything about it. The reason: under British "contempt of court" law, judges quickly impose fines and jail terms on editors and reporters who comment on any case under court review. The purpose of the law is to prevent "trial by newspaper," but no attempt is made to balance fair trial and free press; the law is applied any time press coverage could possibly be prejudicial, even if publication would serve the public interest. If the U.S. had the same law, Watergate might still be under wraps, since the Washington Post would have been silenced after the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and limited to reporting the bare facts at trials and public hearings.
The British press has a tradition of quietly putting up with this and other restrictions on its freedom. But in 1972, the London Sunday Times ran out of patience. In a series of articles entitled "Our Thalidomide Children: A Cause for National Shame," the Sunday Times made it clear that Distillers had been miserly with the Thalidomide victims. The stories provoked public outrage and pressured Distillers to raise its original settlement offer sevenfold, from an average of about $25,000 per child to $175,000. The articles were clearly in contempt of court. But the Sunday Times managed to avoid fines and jail terms by striking a deal: it agreed to show its final—and most damning—article to the government before publishing it. That article, detailing how Distillers had been negligent in selling the dangerous drug in the first place, was firmly banned by a lower court. The paper appealed, but the Law Lords who act as Britain's highest court refused to bend the contempt law, leaving the Sunday Times nowhere else to turn to get the story published.