Will the Boycott Reach Lexis?

Thursday’s Times Literary Supplement contains a Letter to the Editor from a distinguished group of authorsIncluding two Nobel Prize Winners, and a brace of Booker prizewinners, including Canadian Yann Martel suggesting a boycott of the London Book Fair, because its organizers (a sister company to Lexis) are linked to a company pivotal to world arms sales:

Times Online March 01, 2006
The London Book Fair

Sir, – The London Book Fair reflects the benign internationalism that can come from the business of writing. Later this week its stands and seminars will host visitors from eighty countries. The commerce of bookselling traces the contours of an international conversation about books across political and geographical divisions.

It comes as a shock, then, to discover that the London Book Fair has now become connected to an equally global trade that fundamentally undermines peaceful internationalism, fuelling conflict and impoverishment in the world’s poorest regions. Its organizer Reed Exhibitions, owned by the publisher Reed Elsevier, has since 2003 accumulated a portfolio of arms fairs which grease the wheels of the global weapons trade. Last September the Book Fair’s own venue, London’s ExCel Centre, hosted Reed Exhibitions’ crown jewel: Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi), Europe’s largest arms fair. On offer at DSEi was weaponry ranging from small arms, the cause of an estimated 500,000 deaths each year, to tanks and cluster bombs.

Reed Exhibitions have publicly insisted that “the defence industry is central to the preservation of freedom and national security”. Yet military buyers were invited from some of the world’s most violent and repressive regimes, including Colombia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and China, currently subject to a United Nations arms embargo. Reed claims that its arms fairs are subject to “the highest standards of scrutiny and compliance with the law”. Yet at a DSEi fair more than one company was found openly (and illegally) advertising torture equipment. Despite opposition from the local community, London’s mayor and even the Metropolitan Police, Reed Elsevier plans to bring its arms fair back to London in 2007.

We are appalled that our trade should be commercially connected to one which exacerbates insecurity and repression, and which props up regimes inimical to free expression. We call upon Reed Elsevier to end its involvement in a dirty and damaging business; and upon our colleagues to encourage Reed Elsevier to take the book trade out of the arms trade.

A. S. BYATT J. M. COETZEE JOHN CAREY
NADINE GORDIMER MARK HADDON NICK HORNBY
MIKE LEIGH IAN MCEWAN YANN MARTEL
WILL SELF GRAHAM SWIFT ADAM THORPE
ARABELLA WEIR
Campaign Against Arms Trade, 11 Goodwin Street, Finsbury Park, London N4.

Although Reed Elsevier is proud of its corporate responsibility, a year ago, House of Butter reported on a campaign against Reed Elsevier, that extended the argument to Lexis. A letter was written to Lexis senior executives:

Mr Jan Hommen,
Chairman,
Reed Elsevier PLC,
1-3 Strand,
London WC2N 5JR
England.
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7166 5799

Dear Mr Hommen,

We are a group of lawyers and law librarians, who are customers of your subsidiary company, Lexis-Nexis. Many of us have used Lexis-Nexis publications since we were at university. We rely on them now for our daily work. Lexis-Nexis publications are used in our Courts, and are highly visible on Benches and Bar Tables.

We are also aware of Elsevier’s considerable reputation in publishing in medicine and other sciences.

We are therefore extremely distressed to learn that another of Reed Elsevier’s subsidiaries, Spearhead Exhibitions, is in the business of organizing arms fairs, and is staging the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition in London this month.

While we are not suggesting that there is anything illegal in this association, we believe it to be totally incompatible with Reed Elsevier’s core business of publishing for the legal and medical professions. The very phrase “arms fair” is abhorrent: first, because there is nothing “fair” about the arms trade, and second, because the word “fair” implies that it will be a festive occasion – an insult to the children who are killed and maimed every day by land-mines deliberately designed to look like toys and butterflies.

As we have seen in Sarajevo, East Timor, and Iraq, libraries are often the targets, and always among the victims, in any armed conflict situation.

By promoting arms, Reed Elsevier via Spearhead Exhibitions is supporting a superfluous industry : if the arms industry ceased production today, there would still be enough weapons of all kinds available to wipe out the entire human race several times over. Yet the events of September 11, 2001, and London on July 7th 2005, show that the United States, and Britain, despite being the two largest arms manufacturers and exporters in the world, were completely unprepared for terrorist attacks which used inexpensive small-scale technologies to devastating effect.

Government outlays for military purposes play a large role in driving fiscal deficits and in raising global interest rates, leading to increased debt, capital shortage, and cut-backs to social and civil infrastructure, all ofwhich result in the exacerbation of social and ethnic tensions, violent crime, fundamentalism, instability and conflict. The current situation in New Orleans provides a stark illustration of what happens to civil society when funding is diverted from social infrastructure to the arms industry, using the pretext of invented wars (on drugs, on terror, on Iraq……..) as the justification.

The secrecy and lack of transparency of inter-state arms transfers carry the potential for corruption (see for example this BBC item on the Scott Report on British arms deals with Iraq in the 1980s and large numbers of legally traded weapons ending up on the black market, where they are used in terrorist and criminal activities, such as drug trafficking and people trafficking.

“Arms fairs” glamorize weaponry and other aspects of military technology, creating a governmental mentality which gives them priority over socially useful institutions such as courts, legal services, and libraries. Even in a developed country like Australia, many government law libraries are being closed down because Federal and State governments cannot or will not fund them adequately – resulting in substantial loss of business for Lexis-Nexis and other publishers. Furthermore, such an association must surely damage Lexis-Nexis’ reputation as an impartial conduit for legal information and knowledge. It could lose its respected legal writers and authorities, as well as shareholders, who may not care to be associated with a conglomerate which also peddles death and destruction.

We urge you to uphold in practice the ethical standards to which you have subscribed in writing. In order for your support of the UN Global Compact to have any credibility at all, your company must stop organising arms fairs such as DSEi and Helitech Latin America.

We therefore urge you to stop Reed Elsevier’s involvement in all arms fairs.

Yours sincerely

Other campaigns are similarly under way in the medical publishing area.

It seems strange that so little attention has been focussed on this issue in North America. Or would life without Lexis/QL be too dreadful to contemplate?