Slanderous

Defamation, calumny, vilification, or traducement is the communication of a false statement that, depending on the law of the country, harms the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government, religion, or nation.

Under common law, to constitute defamation, a claim must generally be false and must have been made to someone other than the person defamed. Some common law jurisdictions also distinguish between spoken defamation, called slander, and defamation in other media such as printed words or images, called libel.

False light laws protect against statements which are not technically false, but which are misleading.

In some civil law jurisdictions, defamation is treated as a crime rather than a civil wrong. The United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled in 2012 that the libel law of one country, the Philippines, was inconsistent with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as urging that "State parties [to the Covenant] should consider the decriminalization of libel". In Saudi Arabia, defamation of the state, or a past or present ruler, is punishable under terrorism legislation.

A person who defames another may be called a "defamer", "libeler", "slanderer", or rarely "famacide".

The term "Libel" is derived from Latin "libellus" (literally, "small book' or "booklet").

As of 2017, at least 130 UNESCO Member States retained criminal defamation laws. In 2017, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media issued a report on criminal defamation and anti-blasphemy laws among its Member States, which found that defamation is criminalized in nearly three-quarters (42) of the 57 OSCE participating States. Many of the laws pertaining to defamation include specific provisions for harsher punishment for speech or publications critical of heads of state, public officials, state bodies and the State itself. The OSCE report also noted that blasphemy and religious insult laws exist in around one third of OSCE participating States; many of these combine blasphemy and/or religious insult with elements of hate speech legislation.

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