This morning’s Sunday Malice contains a report quoting leading human rights activist, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, as saying that she believed that the proposals in the Leveson report are contrary to the Human Rights Act and would be illegal to implement. I’m not going to link to the Malice, but the BBC takes up the story here. They’ve substantially re-written their story since this morning, but have kept the shock headline that implementing Leveson would be “illegal”.

The official Liberty position is explained here. Far from being a an attack on Leveson, their comments refer only to a fairly minor point of the report, and indeed were included in it as a footnote.

The Malice has apparently agreed to print an apology, but they won’t do so until next Sunday (the original report was carefully reserved for their Sunday edition which they regard as a separate publication). In the meantime they hope that a large proportion of the public will be soaking up their deliberate distortion of Liberty’s position and will be deterred from supporting action. When the apology does come, it will doubtless be in tiny print at the bottom of an inside page. Other news services that have repeated the Malice story will probably never issue a correction.

Now imagine that this story was not a lie about Liberty and Ms. Chakrabarti, but a lie about you. And because you are a private citizen, without spending a fortune on lawyers you would not even be able to secure an apology. It is, of course, much more likely to happen to me, because I’m a member of a minority group that the Malice has a track record of persecuting. But it could happen to anyone. This is why we need action.

Anticipating probable objections, I quote from the Liberty statement:

Leveson does not recommend compulsory statutory regulation of the press and Liberty believes that he is right not to do so.

I agree with them. The most important things we need are to provide private citizens with a cheap and accessible means of making complaints about incorrect media coverage, and a body independent of both press and politicians to adjudicate such complaints.

There is a petition demanding that the government take action on Leveson here.