Compare the Media Law of England and Wales with a European Country Essay

Compare the Media Law of England and Wales with a European Country - Essay Example England and Wales laws differ with other European countries like Italy and Australia, depending on privacy and defamation laws governing the media, as well as regarding the age of criminal responsibility. For example, the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 8, 14 in Italy, 18 in Belgium, and 16 in Spain. This paper will critically analyse how the international journalism and media laws differ from the legal systems in England and Wales, using case studies. The media laws The freedom of speech should be provided to the media, yet, the people have rights which need to be protected; the exact opposite of the media’s rights (Banks and Hanna, 2009, 2). France has been lagging behind in the freedom of the media, it being the last European country to launch the use of television, UK being the first, followed by Italy, then Germany (Katisrea, 2008, 13). In France, broadcasting until 1982, was a state monopoly, controlled by the minister of information and culture, a nd this ushered in a lot of manipulation from the government (Katsirea, 2008, 19). A law passed in 1982 is what brought about the abolishment of state monopoly in broadcasting. In Greece, the media law prohibits advertising children’s toys between 7am and 10 pm. NCRTV is the only independent authority governing the media in Greece. ... ivil, and which allows a victim of harm through publication of materials, word or any other means, to sue the responsible party (Banks and Hanna, 2009, 305). The aim of the laws of defamation is to strike a balance between promoting freedom of speech, and that of protection (Quinn, 2009, 183). The injunctions and super injunctions applied by England’s and Wales’s legal system to protect people from having their information published in the media, are not applied in all European countries, yet, some countries like France have adopted the trend and privacy is incredibly common. The case of Ryan Giggs injunction on Imogen of Big Brother and against the Sun Newspaper is an indication of England and Wales’s regulations on media laws. Ryan Giggs managed to get an injunction in April 2011 against the Sun newspaper mentioning his name as the person involved in the sex scandal with Imogen Thomas (BBC, 2012). The privacy cases arise from the 1998 Human Right Act, which giv es people the right to protection (Quinn, 2009, 251). Injunctions are issued giving rights to them being known, yet the presence of super injunctions is not supposed to be known. Francois Mitterrand’s physician, Claude Gubler, published book in 1996, two weeks after his death revealing his last secret. Mitterrand had been diagnosed with prostrate cancer in 1981, and not in 1992. The family obtained a temporary injunction against the selling of the book, after 40, 000 copies of the final secret had been sold. The injunction was aimed at preventing the selling of the books or even the publishing of the book by the media houses and news papers (Tiersky, 2003, 220). In France when Mitterrand was the president, the media was gagged lot and its freedom restrained. This is evidenced by the fact that he gagged