Human Rights Law: Freedom of Expression and Religion - Term Paper Example

he actual malice standard, actual malice being a standard that has to be met to determine whether a press report can be concluded as being libel or defamation of character has occurred. On March 29, 1960, the New York Times printed a full page entitled "Heed Their Rising Voices", carried a full-page advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices". The advertisement was an appeal for funds to defend the civil rights movement’s leader Martin Luther King. The advert detailed some of the actions taken against the peaceful protestors including the following quote; In Orangeburg, South Carolina, when 400 students peacefully sought to buy doughnuts and coffee at lunch counters in the business district, they were forcibly ejected, tear-gassed, soaked to the skin in freezing weather with fire hoses, arrested en masse and herded into an open barbed-wire stockade to stand for hours in the bitter cold.

(NYT 1960)1 Some actions involved the police force of Alabama whose commissioner was L. B. Sullivan and he claimed that whilst his name was not mentioned it was defamation against him. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution requires that all states provide equal protection under law to all persons and Justice Harlan one of the judges who presided over the case concurred that the first and fourteenth amendment were to be adhered to however he did not go as far as Justice Black who felt all libel laws were unconstitutional.

Thomas Scanlon makes that point that the authority a government has to limit the freedom of citizens in order to maintain a safe environment for example through laws and policy does not include the right whilst preventing these harms to control information to manipulate and maintain certain beliefs. Private moral agency for Scanlon should not be controlled by government regulation.2 Freedom of the press has always been a contested issue when it comes to an allegation of defamation. The law accepts that in certain circumstances it is