Libel Study

In 2010 NPC, Premier Wen proposed that "creating conditions to make sure that people can comment on and supervise the government", reiterated the legal provision in Constitution that citizens have the right to criticize and make suggestions regarding any state organ or functionary. However, legitimate criticisms and suggestions sometimes would be treated as libel and people would be detained, or even be trans-provincial hunted. In this paper,the writer will analyse all aspects of the Libel, based on recent libel cases which are occurred frequently and causing widespread controversies, such as Three Netizens case, Inner Mongolia WuBaoQuan case, PengShui poem case, etc.The paper has three parts. The first part analyses the differences between foreign legislative cases and legal provisions about Libel, and thus further discusses the Libel's criminal constitute and disputes on it under existing criminal law. This paper discusses all aspects of the libel crime constitute. As whether the object or objective aspects of it are controversial, the writer discusses every aspect.The second part is the focus of this essay. The writer describes the crime of false accusation which is easily confused with libel in legal practice and distinguishes them, and analyses the relationship among libel, civil tort and freedom of speech. In real life, defamatory behaviors are not rare, but what is the boundary between defamatory behaviors and libel, in other words what is a crime or not? The writer provides three definitions for this question: Libel and media reports; Libel and "human flesh search"; Libel and infringe the dead reputation. Deeply considerated, libel is the epitome in criminal law of the conflict between free speech and reputation. Treating libel properly is not only related to the comprehensive protection of citizens' reputation, but also related to the dignity of criminal law. As there are many academic controversies for how to balance the weight between freedom of speech and the reputation, the writer hope to seek solutions in the way of analysing related cases in the criminal legislation, from three aspect which are libel legislation goal, freedom of speech and the relationship between the reputation and freedom of speech and the relationship between government officials reputation, and thus makes some recommendations on how to perfect our criminal legislation in libel.The third part discusses the recommendations based on the previous analysis. The writer considers that the libel ought to be perfected not only on criminal legislation, but also requring all aspects of social support and protection. The protection of reputation in our legal system has been relatively complete, but free speech protection is still only stay in constitutional level, which makes free speech as one of citizens' basic rights in weak status, even some local officials used libel as a powerful private tool to infringe citizens' freedom of speech. The ongoing in trans-provincial chase was just because posting a an article reflect public opinion thread. How to put an end to this kind of phenomenon happening again and how to make protection of citizens' freedom of speech put into place, is the purpose of writing this paper.