A British composer was told to go bankrupt yesterday after he unsuccessfully tested to eugene Sue the London Evening Standard for libel. Keith Burstein ran up legal costs of �67,000 defending a test suit libel action against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Standard, over a critical review of one of his operas.
He told Chief Registrar Stephen Baister in the Royal Courts of Justice that he was pickings the case to the European Court of Human Rights. The registrar said Mr Burstein was entitled to take the showcase in Europe but he was compulsory to give the legal costs already run up. This would entail complying with a court monastic order against him by remunerative the �67,000.
When Mr Burstein told the registrar he could not pay, Mr Baister replied: "Then you go insolvent." He added that, in balancing the rights of Associated Newspapers against the speculative nature of what Mr Burstein was hoping to do, it was proper to rule on the side of the newspaper group, which besides publishes the Daily Mail, in forcing him to pay legal costs.
Mr Burstein, 51, confirmed that he would non be able to pay. He is working on a new symphony for the South Bank Symphonia and on an opera with Ben Okri, the Booker Prize winner. "I lead a rather simple life and don't have got many real possessions," he said later.
"But I see this on-going process as a fight I had to look at on, having been incriminated by the initial allegement of idealization. This has no effect on the application to the European Court of Human Rights, which is pending. I will battle all the way in defence of everyone's civil liberty to freedom of thought and expression. There is something really instead sinister in a majority rule about a newspaper chemical group forcing an artist to go bankrupt."
The libel action concerned Mr Burstein's opera, Manifest Destiny, performed at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2005. The critic Veronica Lee wrote in the Standard: "I ground the tone depressingly anti-American, and the idea that there is anything heroic about felo-de-se bombers is, frankly, a grievous revilement". Mr Burstein said that readers would have grounds to think him a terrorist sympathiser who "applauds the military action of self-destruction bombers and raises them to the level of heroism".
The High Court initially ruled that the case should go before a panel but that was upturned by the Appeal Court. That court's ruling was widely interpreted as a landmark decision in respect of the right of journalists to write contemptuous reviews.
Lord Justice Waller, who had seen the opera, described it as "plainly anti-American... it deals with matters upon which strong opinions could be legitimately held". Mr Burstein reiterated his desire to be time-tested in movement of a jury, claiming that the "privileges and responsibilities of free speech had been abused."
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