Smash hit

In 1977 the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body, recommended abolishing the offence of sedition; and in 1985 that the common law offence of defamatory libel (criminal libel) be replaced with a narrow statutory offence.

Lord Lester, who led the charge in the Lords with an eloquent history of the use of the offences including by the British Raj, said in debate: “Across Europe and the Commonwealth, similar offences exist and are used to suppress political criticism and dissent.”

Abolishing the laws, he said, would set an example elsewhere and might encourage the European Court of Human Rights to “adopt a robust position in reviewing such laws and their operation”.

Dr Harris said: “It may be decades late in coming, but the acceptance by the Government that our retention of these repressive laws causes much more harm than good is welcome. The UK must set an example to the world in getting rid of anti-speech offences.”

Article 19, which has campaigned for the reform for many years, also welcomed the move, as it would “make Britain the first Western European country to take this step”.

Dr Agnes Callamard, the group’s executive director, said: “This measure will send a very strong and clear signal globally that democracies do not have criminal defamation laws. No longer will repressive countries be able to justify their criminal defamation laws on the basis that such laws exist in established democracies such as the UK.”

The UK will now join countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Ukraine as well as Ghana, Sri Lanka, the United States, New Zealand and Mexico, which have abolished the offences.

Other groups also hailed the victory. Lisa Appignanesi, president of English PEN, said: “Thomas Paine would be pleased to know that 217 years after his conviction for seditious libel, the law which criminalised his ground-breaking Rights of Man, is at last poised to be repealed.”

Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, said that the news would be of comfort to the hundreds of writers around the world who have been persecuted for criticising their governments.

And Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship, said: “We are well rid of these insidious laws. Every month, we receive reports of governments using sedition and defamation laws to suppress legitimate criticism. In many cases, just the threat of prosecution is enough to scare journalists and campaigners into silence.”

Meanwhile, Lord Lester is hopeful of one further victory to crown his success. In Ireland, when the Defamation Bill becomes law, it will scrap the old offences of seditious, obscene and defamatory libel. But the reform is accompanied with the creation of a much-criticised new statutory offence of blasphemy.

This new offence, he warns, may come to “exercise a chilling effect upon freedom of speech and open the door to questionable and politically charged prosecutions”.

It is a “great pity”, he suggests, that the forthcoming referendum on the Lisbon Treaty cannot be accompanied with a second referendum on the same day, to “get rid of this historical relic of British colonial rule - as was done with the abolition of the death penalty in 2001”.

That would be better than keeping blasphemy alive “in a strange twilight existence”.

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