WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE / EDITORIAL
Wed Dec 24 19:19:54 GMT 2008

For Immediate release.

"UK undermines core Western values"

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Secret_gag_orders_undermine_core_Western_values
See http://wikileaks.org for all other information and
| https://secure.wikileaks.org for secure access.
British courts continue to disgrace Enlightenment values.

This month saw a secret UK court hearing, with secret participants,
produce a secret order to secretly gag the population, the terms
of which are secret and the revelation of which is punishable by
upto 15 years of imprisonment. How many of these orders exist is
unknowable--we glimpse at the severity of the problem only when the
orders are violated.

Secret gag actions are usually associated with the likes of
Saudi-Arabia, China or North Korea. Closed-door justice for the
wealthy emasculates the UK population and grants succor to repressive
regimes across the globe who can look to the UK for validation.

It is time these orders were treated with the contempt they deserve.

Wikileaks previously released the gag order for the Northern Rock
bank collapse, now we release the secret gag order made by High
Court Justice Tugendhat on Dec 15, 2008, aimed at covering up an
email leak from the British establishment. The secret order was
first targeted at UK newspapers, but our copy was destined for the
UK Parliamentary blogger 'Guido Fawkes', editor of 'order-order.com'.
The summary states:

1. The identities of the Applicants/Claimants must remain confidential.
2. The fact of the existence of the Orders must remain confidential.
3. The terms of the Orders must remain confidential.

The order concerns emails from Zac Goldsmith, a noted 2005 Conservative
party recruit, and social climber sibling Jemima Khan. Both are
hairs to the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith. Needless
to say there are no teachers, small business owners or technicians
being granted secret media gag orders in the UK.

The order states that anyone who knows of the order must obey it,
so plaintiff lawyers Carter Ruck have served the order on media
outlets across the British Isles.

Britain is an increasingly dangerous Western disgrace, but you won't hear
about it in the British press. The examples needed to elucidate
just how the country is failing can not be mentioned, accelerating
its decline.

In the last five years Britain has become the the world's largest
arms exporter, the preferred home of Russian and middle-eastern
oligarchs, the world center for "libel tourism" and, as far as
we can tell, the Western capital of secret gag orders.

Only a week ago, on December 17, the High Court of London gave the
go ahead for a libel tourism action against the New York Times.

The same day the Hon. Denis MacShane (Labour) with two MPs from
other parties, told Westminster that UK courts had become a
"Soviet-style organ of censorship".

The UK has recently introduced a national Internet censorship scheme,
a national ID card and is about to spend 12 billion pounds pushing
the British population's web-searches, emails, sms messages and
telephone callings records through a central database run by its
spy agency, GCHQ.

This month also saw British police go into Parliament, without a
warrant, and rifle through the files of a senior member of the
opposition, the Hon. Damian Green MP, who was alleged to have leaked
trivial details about immigration policy to the press.

What's left? The Gulag?

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