By Sakura Saunders

Two large Canadian mining companies, Barrick Gold and Banro Corporation, are suing Écosociété, a small publishing house in Québec, and Montreal-based academics Alain Deneault, Delphine Abadie, and William Sacher.

The mining companies claim that Écosociété is deliberately publishing falsehoods about their operations.

These suits are criticized as being SLAPP suits, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, as the book in question, “Noir Canada,” merely analyses national and international documents already available to the public about Canadian companies operating in Africa.

The combined sum of the lawsuit is $11 million, amounting to 45 times Écosociété’s annual revenue.

In addition, the cases were filed in separate jurisdictions, Barrick filing their suit in Quebec and Banro filing in Ontario, a hurdle that could prove insurmountable for the small publishing house.

Last year Barrick issued a threat of legal action against Vancouver publisher Talonbooks before the book was even published.

The Talonbooks website nevertheless indicates that the book will still be published in May 2011.

So, while Peter Munk is branding the International Studies and Global Policy program at the University of Toronto, his company, Barrick Gold, is, amongst other unspeakable things, threatening free speech.

For more info on the cases, visit: www.freespeechatrisk.ca.

On November 28, 2010, the website Wikileaks, in partnership with some of the world’s leading newspapers, began publishing the first of over 250,000 leaked U.S. government documents. Never before has such a massive amount of secret information been released to the public. The documents are so-called “cables” – dispatches from U.S. diplomats stationed around the world reporting on and giving their opinions on various matters of political importance.

One of the great values of the Wikileaks revelations has been to give us a picture of how the world actually works. So far, among thousands of bits of info, we’ve learned that U.S. diplomats at the United Nations are ordered to spy on foreign delegates, that Saudi Arabia wants the U.S. to bomb Iran, and that America has floated the idea of cutting juicy business contracts to China to secure their support for a unified Korea allied to the U.S. Read more…