Criminal libel

Worme and another v Commissioner of Police of Granada PC TLR 5 February

The crime of intentional libel is committed where a defendant publishes any false defamatory matter, imputing to another person a crime or any misconduct in any public office, with the intention of damaging the reputation of that person, in circumstances where the jury considers that the publication was not for the public benefit. Intention to damage the others reputation is important. The protection of good reputation is conducive to the public good. It is also in the public interest that the reputation of public figures should not be debased falsely. The objective of the offence of criminal libel is therefore sufficiently important to justify limiting the freedom of expression, and is rationally connected to that objective and limited to situations where the publication was not for the public benefit. Of course, the tort of libel provided a civil remedy for damages against those who made such attacks, but that no more showed that a crime of intentional libel was unnecessary than the existence of the tort of conversion showed that a crime of theft was unnecessary. Similarly, the fact that the law of criminal libel has not been invoked in recent years does not show that it is not needed. After all, prosecutions were in one sense a sign, not of the success of a criminal law, but of its failure to prevent the conduct in question. Looking at the position overall, the crime of intentional libel is reasonably required and does not go further than necessary to accomplish that objective. Of course, some democratic societies get along without such a law, but criminal libel in one form or another is to be found in the law of many democratic societies, such as England, Canada and Australia. Accordingly, it could be regarded as a justifiable part of the law of the democratic society of Grenada, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council therefore upheld the constitutionality of the offence in proceedings brought by the police against the publishers of a newspaper which accused Dr Keith Mitchell, the Prime Minister of Grenada, that ‘during the election campaign you spent millions of dollars to bribe people to vote for you and your party, disregarding what the law says governing the electoral process’. For the prosecution to succeed it bore the burden of proving that the statement that the Prime Minister had spent millions of dollars in bribing people to vote for him and his party was false, and the prosecution must also persuade the jury that publication was not for the public benefit.