British author Alan Shadrake speaks during the launch of his book Once a Jolly Hangman in Singapore on Saturday.

British author and freelance journalist Alan Shadrake, 75, who was arrested in Singapore while promoting his book on executions (as reported earlier on MobyLives here), was released on bail Tuesday pending further investigations by police.

According to a Agence France Presse wire report, “a local activist posted bail of 10,000 Singapore dollars (47,000 pounds) for him.” Shadrake is facing charges of criminal defamation and contempt of court, which are punishable by jail and fines for his book—Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock which addresses the governments use of the death penalty.

“Critics say Singapore, which has only five million people, has one of the world’s highest rates of executions but the government refuses to disclose any numbers and maintains that capital punishment helps keep crime rates low,” observes the AFP report.

Upon release a haggard-looking Shadrake told the AFP “he had hardly slept ’since they dragged me out of bed. I’ve had a few hours of sleep on a very hard floor and I’ve been sitting at the desk being interrogated all day long explaining all the chapters of the book and going through the history of the book, my research, why I did the book.’”

According to the AFP:

Amnesty International earlier urged Singapore’s government to immediately release the elderly author.

“Singapore uses criminal defamation laws to silence critics of government policies,” Donna Guest, Amnesty’s Asia Pacific Deputy Director, said in London.

“The Singapore government should release Shadrake at once.”

She added: “If Singapore aspires to be a global media city, it needs to respect global human rights standards for freedom of expression… Singapore should get rid of both its criminal defamation laws and the death penalty.”

Shadrake’s passport has been impounded to prevent him from leaving Singapore until the case is resolved. Hearings for the case are scheduled to begin July 30th.

Good day's work on the floor of the US Senate.

Freedom-loving folks around the United States are celebrating the Senate’s passage yesterday of a bi-partisan bill to prevent “libel tourism,” a growing problem that has had a definite chilling effect on free speech.

The Association of American Publishers‘ press release on the bill’s passage, available here, states:

[T]he U.S. book publishing industry cheered today’s Senate passage of bi-partisan legislation that will protect American authors and publishers from foreign libel judgments that undermine First Amendment free speech rights.

The SPEECH Act, which passed the Senate this afternoon by unanimous consent, prohibits federal courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign libel judgments that do not pass First Amendment muster. The legislation also allows American authors and publishers to go into court and seek a declaration that such a foreign judgment is not enforceable in the U.S., and to do so even if no attempt has been made to enforce the foreign judgment.

The AAP’s statement went on to explain libel tourism and its dangers:

The exploitation of plaintiff-friendly foreign libel laws as a weapon to silence American authors and prevent them from speaking out on issues of public concern began attracting public attention after U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld was successfully sued in England by a Saudi billionaire even though her book had never been published there. AAP supported Dr. Ehrenfeld in her legal efforts to have the judgment thrown out by a U.S. court, and played a key role in lobbying for federal legislation. Similar legislation passed the House last year

“We’re very pleased with the Senate’s action,” said Judith Platt, AAP’s director of Freedom to Read. “As we told Congress, these foreign libel judgments not only deprive American authors and publishers of their right to speak, they deprive our citizenry of their right to be informed. The legislation passed today will significantly reduce that chilling effect.”

Just when you thought the Senate couldn’t agree on anything, they do something like this. Nice work!

Alan Shadrake

“A veteran British journalist and author promoting his book on the death penalty in Singapore was arrested in the country today for alleged criminal defamation and other offenses. Alan Shadrake’s arrest came two days after Singapore’s Media Development Authority lodged a police report,” according to a Guardian report.

Shadrake’s book, Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice In The Dock, published by a Malaysian publisher and released in Malaysia first, “was withdrawn from the shelves of one of Singapore’s biggest book shops last week after the retailer, Kinokuniya, was contacted by the Media Development Authority, which controls censorship in Singapore,” according to another report from the Asian Correspondent. The report says “The book calls into question the way the government deploys the death penalty, suggesting that justice can be less than even in Singapore. The government has shown little tolerance in the past for those who cast doubt on the independence and fairness of the judiciary.”

The book contains an interview with Darshan Singh, the long-time chief executioner at Singapore’s Changi Prison, now retired, as well as interviews with local human rights activists, lawyers and former police officers.

The death penalty is mandatory for murder, treason and drug trafficking in Singapore.

According to the Asian Correspondent story, Shadrake, who reports for the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, first “came to prominence in Singapore in 2005 after revealing the identity of Singapore’s hangman, Darshan Singh, shortly before he executed Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Van Tuong in a controversial case that caused friction between the Australian and Singaporean governments.”

A story in The Australian reports Shadrake said “after the book’s Singapore launch on Saturday that he had expected trouble, but felt that the authorities were not going to take action. ‘If they do anything, it’ll just draw more attention to it all, and they have no defence,’ he said.”

Defamation carries a sentence of two years’ imprisonment or a fine or both. The Foreign Office in London is seeking more information from local authorities.

Paul McCartney was recently awarded the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at a star-studded ceremony at the White House hosted by the Obamas. A story at the Washington Post reveals a PBS broadcast of the event censored his below remarks:

“A coalition of booksellers and Internet content providers on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging an expansion of Massachusetts‘ obscenity law to include electronic communications that may be harmful to minors,” according to this report from the Associated Press.

The new law, which went into effect Monday, was an attempt to close a loophole in the existing law that did not cover electronic communications. It was passed in response to the Supreme Judicial Court’s overturning of the conviction of a man accused of sending obscene instant messages to someone he believed to be a 13 year-old girl.

“The new law, passed quickly by the state Legislature after the ruling, added instant messages, text messages, e-mail and other electronic communications to the old law,” reports the AP.

The lawsuit contends that this new law is too broad and, the changes create “‘a broad censorship law that imposes severe content-based restrictions’” on the dissemination of constitutionally protected speech,” according to the AP.

The report continues:

The plaintiffs include the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Association of American Publishers, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and other groups. They argue that the expanded law effectively bans from the Internet anything that may be considered “harmful to minors,” including material adults have a First Amendment right to view, including information about contraception, pregnancy, sexual health, literature and art.

“For most communications over the Internet, it is not possible for a person sending or posting the communication to ensure that the communication will not be read or seen by a minor,” the lawsuit states.

The law is written in such a way that it encompasses “all Internet communications — such as postings on websites and through listservs, which might be read or seen by a minor — and not merely those communications directed to a specific minor.”

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s spokesperson has said that the law is being reviewed.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, book critic

“Russian police seized 100,000 copies of a book critical of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that activists planned to hand out at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum,” according to a report in the Guardian.

The book is Putin. The Results. 10 Years On [sic], written by opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, and it reportedly has a print run of one million copies.

Olga Kurnosova, head of the city’s branch of the opposition United Civic Front, told the Guardian that the books were “intended for participants of the forum” and the reasons for the seizure “are not very clear”.

And, according to the Guardian account, Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, wrote in his blog that the aim of the book was to “tell the truth about the real results of the leadership of Putin and the tandem”— tandem meaning Putin’s ally President Dmitry Medvedev.

Mr. Nemtsov has tangled with the Russian powers-that-be in the past. According to the Guardian, “Last year he published a similar book about Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who won a libel case and forced him to retract a statement about corruption in the city hall.”

The Great Escape

According to a Fox News report, “An attorney for East Arkansas regional Unit prisoner Steven Sera sued the Arkansas Department of Correction over access to Standards for Adult Correctional Institutions, which includes requirements prisons must meet to be accredited by the American Correctional Association.

“Sera’s attorney, John Wesley Hall Jr., says the book is harmless because it contains general standards, not specific details. The department says information in the book about security procedures could be used to facilitate escapes,” according to Fox News.

The book is published by the American Correctional Association, a professional organization for the Corrections industry, which describes the contents of the $50 book on their website as follows:

Includes standards covering the critical program areas for effective institutional management, including safety procedures, security, rules and discipline, staff development, physical plant, and health care services.

Nothing about standards for escaping….

The Adventures of Tintin continues. The series of comics about Tintin, a young Belgian reporter and his faithful dog Milou, created by Belgian artist Georges Rémi under the pseudonym Hergé, has been a staple of Francophone culture since its beginnings in 1929.

But recently the book Tintin in the Congo has come under attack in Belgium as racist by Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Belgium-based Congolese man. According to this report in the Agence France Press, he “has been pursuing the Herge foundation Moulinsart in the criminal court for three years” trying to get the offending episode taken off the shelves.

According to AFP,  Moulinart’s lawyers recently “compared a legal attempt to ban the comic book, for racism, to book burning. ‘I cannot accept racism but I consider it equally lamentable that we burn books. To ban books is to burn them,’ Alain Berenboom, lawyer for Moulinsart, told a court in Brussels. ‘Since the freedom of the press law of 1831 there are very few books banned in Belgium.’”

Berenboom, a former head of the Belgian human rights league, told the AFP, ‘”In Egypt an association wants to ban the Arabian Nights. That’s not where we are in Belgium.’”

Mondondo has opened a second civil case last month, “joined by a fellow countryman living in Kinshasa and is supported by the French black associations group CRAN, which wants the book to remain on sale but with a warning preface,” report the AFP. It is due to be heard June 21st.

The author, Georges Remi (1907-1983), “justified the book by saying it was merely a reflection of the naive views of the time. Some of the scenes were revised for later editions,” writes the AFP.

“‘This book contains images and dialogue of a manifestly racist and offensive nature not only to blacks but to the whole of humanity,’” Mondondo’s lawyer Ahmed L’Hedim told the AFP, “‘It is simply unbearable to my client that his children could come across this book and feel insulted.’”

Does he like it, or doesn't he?

“Reports have emerged about the banning of some books and pressure on independent publishers at the Tehran Book Fair, which is one of the most important cultural events in the Islamic Republic,” says a Radio Free Europe wire story. “Iran’s Writers Association has said in a statement hat a number of prominent publishing houses have been banned from attending the fair and the licenses of several have been cancelled. According to the statement, several of the publishers have also been summoned by security officials.”

Though censorship is nothing new in Iran, the summoning of publishers and revocation of licenses is unprecedented. According to the RFE report, the Writers Association “has condemned the state pressure on independent book publishers and warned about the ‘increased censorship and cultural crackdown’ in Iran.”

Books by Iranian writer and critic Houshang Golshiri, prominent female poet Forough Farokhzad, and the reformist cleric Mohsen Kadivar, who is currently a visiting research professor at America’s Duke University, have all been banned from the fair.

Also, no books published before President Mahmud Ahmadinejad took power in 2005 are allowed to be presented at the book fair.

An unnamed publisher was quoted as saying that “authorities have warned against political discussions and ‘propaganda against the system’ at the booths and said they will be dealt with in ‘a tougher manner than one can imagine,” according to the RFE report.

Also removed from the fair: all books about late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, father of Iran’s opposition Green Movement who died last year, and Ayatollah Sanei, a senior reformist cleric in Qom who has come under attack by the hard-liners for supporting the opposition movement and condemning the post-election crackdown.

Even books from Egypt’s booth were also confiscated because they referred to the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf. The security state seems particularly insecure during this Book Fair.

Orlando Figes

The excrement is really hitting the fan for Orlando Figes in the wake of his confession on Friday that it wasn’t his wife who’d been writing nasty Amazon reviews of books by other historians, as he’d first claimed — it was him. (See the earlier MobyLives report.) The British press this weekend was awash in reports that he could face multiple lawsuits and that his academic position may be in jeopardy, as well as with second looks into numerous past charges of plagiarism that journalists and historians now say Figes suppressed by constantly threatening expensive lawsuits.

“He now faces legal action from at least two of the authors he wrote about” in his Amazon reviews, according to a Saturday Daily Telegraph report. “There have been some large legal costs built up in the last week which I hope to retrieve from the Figes family,” Rachel Polonsky tells the paper. The Telegraph also notes that “Dr Polonsky said she would offer legal help to Prof [Robert] Service, the historian who initially sent an email to a dozen historians about the anonymous reviews. He was threatened with libel proceedings by Figes’s laywer.”

Robert Service

Service says, “I have a distaste for scholars who reach for the instrument of law but the damage done to me has been acute. I am just reserving my position and I am expecting there to be consequences.”

Another story in the Independent reports that Figes “has a history of litigious academic spats,” and details several charges of plagiarism brought against Figes over the years. The story also notes that Figes’ job as professor of Russian hisotry at Birkbeck College, University of London may be in jeopardy, and quotes one anonymous colleague calling the incident “career suicide” and saying Figes might “never recover.”

Meanwhile a story in Saturday’s Independent looks at an excuse — or possible legal defense? — planted by Figes (or his p.r. handler) in his Friday morning confession: his comment that “This crisis has exposed some health problems.” According to the Independent, “Reports circulated on his increasingly depressed state of health, believed to have been triggered by a trip to Russia to interview victims of the gulag for his 2007 book The Whisperers.”

But the rumors may be hurting more than helping Figes’ case. “Millions of innocent people had their mental health destroyed by Stalin. Take it from me. Whatever his PR man may say, Orlando Figes is not one of them,” Polonsky says in a remarkable and gripping account for the Daily Mail in which she details her involvement with the story:

Going online to check how my book Molotov’s Magic Lantern was faring, I noticed a new review.

The reviewer, Historian, had given my book just one star. On Amazon, one star means ‘I hate it’.

‘This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever written,’ Historian began. ‘Polonsky, it turns out, is not an academic, as claimed in the blurb, but the wife of a foreign lawyer.’

I called to my husband Marc, who is indeed a lawyer, and has joint British and American nationality, from the study. ‘Look, Figes has reviewed me anonymously on Amazon.’ I knew it was him immediately….

… I clicked on the ‘See all my reviews’ link beside Historian’s name, and read all ten. As well as trashing my book, Historian had trashed three books by Bob Service, and the book by Kate Summerscale that beat Figes and The Whisperers to the lucrative Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008.

‘It is better to go to Figes’s The Whisperers,’ Historian told Amazon readers in his hatchet-job on Service’s Stalin.

All it took was one click on Historian’s profile to link to the incriminating nickname ‘orlando-birkbeck’. How could he have been so careless, I marvelled. The nickname was generated when Figes set up his Amazon account to buy books.

When he created Historian’s profile on the same account in 2008 and began to publish online reviews, he doubtless did not inspect the details of this profile – never pressed the link on his own name that led straight to the incriminating nickname.

Rachel Polonsky

Her account also details how Figes had his lawyer issues repeated threats to Sevice, who feared legal expenses would bankrupt him. Service himself posts a similarly compelling account of the affair in the Guardian, in which he states his intention to work to change British libel laws that allowed for such intimidation:

The public interest in this squalid little story is that if someone is wealthy and malicious enough it is possible to tread on the throat of free and open discussion in this country almost with impunity. I was close to caving in at times simply because I lacked Figes’s financial resources. We have a set of libel laws seemingly designed to produce another Robert Maxwell. At the same time we have electronic media that enable the ink to flow from poison pens. In my case, these two features of our culture were wrapped around each other like a vicious weed. Legislative reform is urgently required.

But perhaps the most surprising revelation was Polonsky’s divulgence of the act that may have finally triggered Figes to come clean: a private note Polonsky sent to Figes wife, Stephanie Palmer, “telling her I meant her and her family no harm, urging her to come clean, and suggesting that Orlando Figes’s only real enemy was inside his own head.” Palmer replied, says Polonsky. “She sent me an email, thanking me for my message, and the next day came the PR-managed announcement that Figes had confessed.”