Category: Media
29 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Her Majesty’s Attorney-General Claimant – and – (1) MGN Limited Defendants (2) News Group Newspapers Limited – Read judgment
The High Court has found that the Daily Mirror and The Sun were in breach of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 (1981 Act) in relation to their reporting of the Jo Yeates murder case. The court was strongly critical of the “vilification” of a man who was arrested but quickly released without charge.
The proceedings were in relation to Christopher Jefferies, a school teacher who was arrested early on in the investigation. The court fined the Daily Mirror £50,000 and The Sun £18,000.
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19 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Attorney General v Associated Newspapers Ltd & Anor [2011] EWHC 1894 (Admin) – Read judgment
The High Court has handed down fines of £15,000 each and to Associated Newspapers and News Group Newspapers (NGN), owners of The Daily Mail and The Sun, for contempt of court. The companies will also have to pay £28,117.23 to cover the Attorney General’s costs. This blog’s co-editor Angus McCullough QC appeared for the Attorney General in the case but is not the writer of this post.
The newspapers’ owners, particularly NGN, probably have other things on their minds at the moment. But the fines, which relate to contempt proceedings decided in March (read judgment / my post) represent something of a landmark, as they are the first relating to online publication. In this case, The Sun Online and Mail Online published pictures of Ryan Ward holding a gun whilst he was on trial for murder.
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12 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
2011 may be remembered as the year of Article 8. The public may not realise it, but the two major news stories of this year have had at their core the 8th article of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to privacy and family life. And without this controversial law, the phone-hacking scandal may never have been exposed.
First came the super-injunctions scandal, in which the public, egged on by the popular press, became enraged at sportsmen using expensive privacy injunctions to keep details of their alleged bad behaviour out of the news. That scandal has now been replaced by a much bigger one, relating to illegal phone hacking. The affair has already led to the demise of the News of the World.
As the human rights organisation Liberty have pointed out, the newspaper was never a fan of New Labour’s Human Rights Act. Amongst other things, it fought an expensive and partially successful privacy battle against Max Mosley over claims that he slept with prostitutes in a “sick Nazi orgy“. It has always been suspected that the tabloid press’s almost universal antipathy towards the 1998 Act, which in theory at least should be popular as it protects citizens against nasty state intrusion, was inspired by the fear that the privacy rights it bolstered, despite the competing right to freedom of expression, would prevent them doing their jobs. And now, with some irony, it is a tabloid newspaper and not a public authority which may represent the 1998 Act’s most high-profile scalp.
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6 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
The News of the World phone-hacking scandal has reignited over claims that phones belonging to the families of 7/7 bombing victims and murdered children such as Milly Dowler were hacked.
The scandal has been rumbling on since 2007, but is again the main story in the news. The affair has been the subject of a number of court hearings, mostly surrounding disclosure by News International in the ongoing private compensation claims by alleged victims. There are important issues of privacy and freedom of the press surrounding some of the allegations, but primarily this is a criminal investigation into the illegal hacking of mobile phones.
For those who are coming to the issue for the first time, or need a little revision, there is no better starting point than the International Forum for Responsible Media (INFORRM) Blog, which has been covering the scandal in meticulous detail since its launch around 18 months ago. In particular, see:
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30 June 2011 by Adam Wagner
In today’s Daily Express, Stephen Pollard has written an article entitled We must regain right to kick out foreign criminals. There is a lot wrong with the article, not least the misrepresentation – not for the first time, either – of a 2007 case involving the failed deportation of headmaster Philip Lawrence’s killer.
Pollard is responding to the European Court of Human Rights ruling in Sufi and Elmi v UK, in which the court ruled that the situation in Somalia was so dire that except in very limited scenarios it will not be possible to deport people back to the country. Rosalind English has already examined the case in more detail.
As I say, there are many problems with the article, which follows the standard anti-human rights act playbook. It is worth addressing them as they are likely to be repeated elsewhere. Here are just a few.
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19 June 2011 by David Hart KC
Gaunt, R (ota) v. Ofcom [2011] EWCA Civ 692 read judgment
No prizes for guessing which redtop hosted an article so titled. Its author, given his past, felt very strongly about Redbridge Council seeking to ban foster parents from smoking; hence his article dubbed them as “health and safety Nazis”. So he went on and interviewed a councillor on Talksport, had a go at him – and then completely “lost it”. He promptly lost his job, and got rapped over the knuckles by Ofcom for being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. This case is about his unsuccessful attempt to overturn the latter on Article 10 grounds – interference with freedom of speech.
Somewhat ambitious appeal, this. Para. 2.1 of the Broadcasting Code seeks to protect members of the public from harmful and/or offensive materials. Para 2.3 says that broadcasters must ensure that material which may cause offence is justified by the context. Such material may include, among other material, offensive language.
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14 June 2011 by Guest Contributor
The latest issue of the Index on Censorship magazine is entitled “Privacy is Dead! Long live privacy” and includes an interview with Mr Justice Eady, conducted by the veteran legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg entitled “Balancing Acts“.
This is a rare example of an interview with a serving judge. It was conducted on 11 April 2011 – before heat was turned up in the “Superinjunction Spring”. Despite the worst efforts of the “Sunday Times” – of which more in a moment – the interview contains few surprises for those who have taken the trouble to read Mr Justice Eady’s judgments (and lectures) on the subject of privacy.
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13 June 2011 by Adam Wagner
Tomorrow sees the beginning of a contempt of court prosecution against a juror who allegedly communicated on the social networking site Facebook with a defendant who had already been acquitted.
The co-editor of this blog, Angus McCullough QC, is representing the Attorney General in the case; he is not the writer of this post. Isabel McArdle has already posted on the case – for background, see Silence please: A Facebook contempt of court – allegedly.
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26 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
In 1991 US band Salt-n-Pepa reached number 2 in the UK charts with Let’s Talk About Sex. It is difficult to imagine now, 20 years on, why such an inoffensive and gently educational song generated huge controversy.
That difficulty highlights how much less prudish we are about sex now than we were then. Salt-n-Pepa talked about sex on the “radio and video shows“. Now the song would include Twitter, YouTube and Facebook too. In the post-internet age, sex is everywhere. So why are judges and politicians still making decisions about whose sex the public can or cannot talk about?
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25 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
Bryant & Ors, R (on the application of) v The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2011] EWHC 1314 (Admin) (23 May 2011) – Read judgment
The police may have a duty under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to privacy) to inform members of the public that their phone calls have been intercepted.
This was only a judicial review permission hearing, which means that the full “substantive” judicial review will still have to be argued at a later date. In short, the case is the latest in the long-running News of the World phone hacking affair (see this post and this one on Inforrm’s Blog for the latest developments).
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24 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
Lots of lawyers are blogging and tweeting. Should they be?
I spoke last Thursday at the second #lawblogs event, kindly hosted in the grand (not to mention establishment) surrounding of The Law Society. The event was attended by around 75 people, most of whom had a passion for legal blogging and tweeting. You can read the Twitter feed of the event here, or reviews by James Wilson, Mike Scutt, James Dean of The Times (paywall) and The Guardian’s Siobhain Butterworth .
One issue which I tried to explore was the professional ethics of lawyers blogging and tweeting. There are a number of questions which lawyers could, and probably should, ask themselves before making their social media debut . Is it right for lawyers to comment publicly on the law? What about on their own cases? And might there be a positive ethical duty to explain the law to the general public?
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23 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
John Hemming MP has somewhat predictably “revealed” the name of a footballer who has been trying to keep his alleged affair with a reality TV contestant private, and breached the traditional “sub judice” rule in the process. Does this mean that the privacy injunction in question is now effectively defunct?
Hemming made his move just hours after Mr Justice Eady in the High Court maintained the injunction against an application by News Group International, despite the fact that many users of Twitter have apparently revealed his name. Eady took a principled stance:
Should the court buckle every time one of its orders meets widespread disobedience or defiance? In a democratic society, if a law is deemed to be unenforceable or unpopular, it is for the legislature to make such changes as it decides are appropriate.
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22 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
I asked in a recent post whether journalists need to attend court hearings to report accurately. The post arose from judgment in a family court case involving a mother’s abuse of her baby. The judge took the unusual step of criticising the Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker’s reporting, which he called “unbalanced, inaccurate and just plain wrong“. That criticism was then supported by the most senior family judge in a different judgment.
Christopher Booker has now responded to my post, although somewhat obliquely. He writes:
I was again attacked last week by a prominent legal blogger, for reporting on cases where the system appears to be going tragically wrong, without having sat for days in court to hear “both sides of the story”.
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20 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
Lord Neuberger has published his long-awaited report on super-injunctions. His committee was set up in April 2010 in order to “examine the issues around the use of injunctions which bind the press and so-called ‘super-injunctions“.
In summary, the report emphasises the principles of open justice and the right to freedom of speech, and that courts should “ensure that any derogation from open justice is the minimum necessary to secure the proper administration of justice”. It recommends that Civil Procedure Rule 39.2 (concerning public hearings) should be amended to make reference to the strict necessity test.
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19 May 2011 by Alasdair Henderson
W v. M, S, an NHS PCT and Times Newspapers Ltd. [2011] EQHC 1197 (COP) – read judgment. In the midst of all the fuss over the last two weeks about ‘superinjunctions’ and the law on privacy (see our coverage here, here, here and here) the Court of Protection (“CoP”) has just granted an injunction imposing extensive reporting restrictions on the media in a case involving potentially controversial end-of-life issues.
The press has picked up on the decision mainly because the injunction is the first in the UK courts (and perhaps anywhere in the world) to specifically prohibit publishing restricted information on any “social network or media including Twitter or Facebook“. This is noteworthy given the recent furore about an anonymous Twitter user ‘outing’ a number of UK celebrities who had obtained injunctions (although given that Twitter is a US-based website, it is difficult to see how the order will be enforced). But the decision by Baker J is far more interesting for the way he described how the media’s free speech rights should be balanced against the parties’ privacy rights in the kind of sensitive cases dealt with by the CoP, and how he expressly distinguished it from the approach taken in celebrity cases.
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