- Title
- Defamation and vilification: rights to reputation, free speech and freedom of religion at common law and under human rights laws
- Creator
- Foster, Neil
- Relation
- Cultural and Religious Freedom Under a Bill of Rights Conference, 2009. Papers of the 2009 Australia Conference: Cultural and Religious Freedom Under a Bill of Rights 2009 (Canberra 13-15 August, 2009)
- Relation
- http://www.iclrs.org/index.php?blurb_id=545&page_id=4
- Publisher
- University of Adelaide/International Center for Law and Religion Studies
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- For many years the common law of defamation, and statutory amendments to it, have protected a person‟s reputation in the community, in the sense of the right not be denigrated in the eyes of others. While this involves a restriction on another powerful common law principle of “freedom of speech” (see the discussion in the High Court of Australia decision in Australian Broadcasting Corporation v O’Neill (2006) 227 CLR 57), a complex set of checks and balances have been developed to cope with this clash. The issues as to whether a person has a right not to be “vilified” (and what this means, ranging from “being the subject of death threats” to “humiliated” or “annoyed”) on the basis of their religious beliefs, have a number of connections with the issues dealt with by the law of defamation. In this paper I will explore some of these connections and examine whether a specific law on “religious vilification” is justified, or whether the protection provided by the law of defamation would be adequate for most purposes.
- Subject
- defamation; vilification; rights to reputation; free speech; religious freedom; common law; human rights law
- Identifier
- uon:8937
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/919652
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