Political speech and defamation of public figures: A comparative analysis of prevailing jurisprudence in the United States, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Kingdom and Australia

Defamation laws are made to protect people from injury to their reputations. At the same time, for the maintenance of a representative democracy, legal measures that are based on a liberal concept of free expression usually give preference to free political speech. These social interests have created a legal problem of finding a balance between the rights of speech and reputation. Because solutions to this problem are not uniform, the present study aimed at finding how the jurisprudential approaches of the United States, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Kingdom and Australia are similar or different in their balancing of free political speech and the reputation of public figures. The study examined whether the prevailing positions of these jurisdictions are converging or diverging, and looked at the extent they restricted libel laws to justify protecting free political speech. To achieve its goals, the study combined historical analysis, case-law analysis and qualitative content analysis. This method of triangulation revealed that social and political conditions shaped the jurisprudential history of the jurisdictions and combined with the principles of democracy to inspire protecting free political speech. The study found that recent developments in political defamation laws in the jurisdictions are converging. In political defamation cases, the jurisdictions employed multiple rationales that mainly consisted of search for the truth, democratic self-governance and self-fulfillment principles to justify restrictions on libel laws. Also, all the jurisdictions accepted discussion and criticism of matters of public concern, political deliberation, or opinion about government as the subject matter that could merit protection against individual reputation in political defamation cases. With different tests, the United States, the European Court of Human Rights, and Australia weighed political speech against reputation through a preferred balancing approach (a legal balancing approach that gives more protection to political speech). On the other hand, balancing of the interests in the United Kingdom was elastic because it used an ad hoc balancing method to decide cases. Moreover, the jurisdictions were split on making distinctions among political defamation plaintiffs. While the United States and the European Court of Human Rights recognized distinctions in the status of political libel plaintiffs, the United Kingdom and Australia depended on public interest in information concerning matters of public concern. It must be noted that the United Kingdom under the Human Rights Act 1998, has recently incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights provisions and jurisprudence into its domestic law. This development enables the United Kingdom to leave aside its traditional rules of statutory interpretation and conform to the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence.