What is sedition? (Part 1)

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Raja Petra Kamarudin

malaysiatoday - [...] The fact that sedition has often been used as a political tool and not for a legitimate public purpose is another factor contributing to its repudiation by common law courts. Authors, Gitobu Imanyara and Kibe Mungai, when reviewing Kenya’s now repealed Sedition Act, observed: "Sedition was always a political, rather than a criminal, offence. Thus, there was no vigorous effort on the part of the government to prove the culpability of an accused in court.” In England, sedition survived only as a common law offence of Seditious Libel and prosecutions since the Reform Act of 1832 have been rare. The last conviction in England for Seditious Libel occurred in 1909. This was a prosecution of the printer of the Indian Socialist, a publication that advocated independence for India.

The last prosecution for Seditious Libel initiated by the English crown was in l947 and this prosecution ended in an acquittal. In l991, a private individual sought to compel a magistrate to issue a summons for Seditious Libel and blasphemy based on the book Satanic Verses, against both the author, Salman Rushdie, and the printer. The Queen’s Bench Division, on judicial review of the magistrate’s refusal to issue the summons, found as a fact that Satanic Verses contained passages that promoted hostility and ill-will amongst the Queen’s subjects and had caused the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran, but did not disclose an intention to incite violence against constituted authority. The Court of Queen’s Bench unanimously upheld the magistrate’s ruling that the prosecution for sedition could not proceed.

Lord Justice Watkins, giving judgment for the Court, relied on the statement of law contained in the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Boucher v. The King and stated that:“…the seditious intention upon which a prosecution for Seditious Libel must be founded is an intention to incite to violence or to create public disturbance or disorder against the sovereign or the institutions of Government. Proof of an intention to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of subjects do not alone establish a seditious intention. Not only must there be proof of an incitement to violence in this connection, but it must be violence or resistance or defiance for the purpose of disturbing constituted authority, meaning some person or body holding public office or discharging some public function of the state.”
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