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Thread: Superinjunctions

  1. #1

    Default Superinjunctions

    Recently there has been an increasing number of reported cases of "Superinjunctions", injunctions whereby a court orders that the press is not allowed to publish something and furthermore that it can't even be reported that the injunction was issued or identify who got the injunction.

    These have frequently been about cases of celebrities (often Premier League players) having affairs. There have also been more political/serious instances though, like that of Trafigura a company involved in a scandal of toxic waste being dumped which got a superinjunction to gag reporting on the toxic spill and legal issues involving it.

    One reason why these have been so much in the press, ironically given they're not supposed to, has been both an apparent increase in the volume of these being issued with an increase of them being broken. Either by bloggers/individuals/social networks etc online ... or by MP's using the ancient Parliamentary Priviledge bringing it up in Parliament (as happened with Trafigura). An MP's speech in the Commons is protected can not be sued for what they say in Parliament (even if libellous or contempt of court) and once its been said others can essentially report it.

    I am uneasy with any attempts to gag the press, even (although I understand the necessity) the most urgent cases of national security etc or other reasons why lives may be at risk. For footballers etc having affairs/sleeping with prostitutes or companies dumping toxic waste or whatever, however serious or not I think the press should have a right to report on it if they choose. If its false, sue for libel/slander - but this is blocking publication of events which are true.

  2. #2
    It seems like the courts are being trusted with an authority that requires reasonable judgement and discretion in its use, but they are totally blowing through that with unreasonable and excessive injunctions.

    At least from a foreigners eyes, I can't help but associate this with the problems with British libel laws.

    Can Parliament remove judges easily?

  3. #3
    What problem with British libel laws?

    This is a modern issue, dating back only a few years. Britain did not have a law of privacy like this, the European Human Rights Act enshrined both a right to freedom of expression and a right to privacy. The judges are erring on the side of privacy.

    I've never heard of Parliament removing judges.

  4. #4

  5. #5
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    Yeah, those British libel laws are indeed messed up. Though I am under the impression not so much of a problem inside the EU.
    Congratulations America

  6. #6
    The idea that Twitter itself has made this law "an ass" is yet another great example of the media's navel-gazing obsession with Twitter. After all, this article itself naming the man demonstrates the issue at hand.

    But neat how this is being turned on its head.

    May 23, 2011

    British Lawmakers Join Fray as Twitter Tests Law

    By SARAH LYALL

    LONDON — After he cleverly obtained a court ruling forbidding the news media from reporting on his possible affair with a “Big Brother” contestant, the Manchester United soccer player Ryan Giggs must have thought he had avoided a whole lot of trouble.

    The tough ruling banned anyone from reporting his name, her name, the supposed affair, even the very existence of the order itself. But anonymity would prove an elusive goal for He Who Shall Not Be Named, as some called the unfortunate Mr. Giggs, who had not reckoned on the wicked anarchy of Twitter.

    The clash between old-media law and new-media reality soon descended into a chaotic farce, with Mr. Giggs’s name appearing in some 75,000 postings over the weekend, even as British news organizations were still legally forbidden to print it.

    In the House of Commons, John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament, said that “you would virtually have to be living in an igloo” not to know what was going on, and that the use of Twitter was “in danger of making the law look an ass.”

    The showdown has been brewing for weeks, since Britain’s newspapers began reporting on the proliferation of so-called super-injunctions like the one given to Mr. Giggs — court orders forbidding news outlets from reporting even that they cannot report something.

    Typically, requests for such orders are made by public figures eager to halt the spread of tabloid-fodder stories about affairs, romps with prostitutes and the like. They have also been obtained by companies hoping to hush up damaging accusations.

    Once they win the super-injunctions, the parties are then generally identified by random initials that have nothing to do with their real names.

    Since news of the existence of super-injunctions began filtering out in 2009, there has been a stampede on social media sites to identify the people behind them.

    The latest incident began, really, last Friday, when a Twitter user identified Mr. Giggs as the man seeking to hide accusations of an extramarital affair with Imogen Thomas, a beauty pageant winner who had once appeared on “Big Brother.”

    The first post set off an avalanche of further tweets and retweets, in the form of information dissemination as well as jokes at Mr. Giggs’s expense.

    Mr. Giggs was subsequently identified so many times on Twitter — 75,000, according to John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat member of Parliament — that he became a worldwide trending topic. On Friday, Mr. Giggs’s lawyers said they planned to sue Twitter to find the people behind the initial posts.

    Meanwhile, newspapers were still forbidden to print his name. They did not identify him when fans from the opposing team at a soccer match on Saturday made up lewd Giggs-related chants. Nor did they identify him in Monday morning’s papers, even though The Sunday Herald in Glasgow, claiming that the law did not apply in Scotland, printed his photograph on the front page with his eyes obscured.

    “Frankly, I don’t care if Ryan Giggs had an affair or not, but I absolutely care that I can’t tell my readers something that they can find out in two seconds by switching on a computer,” said Richard Walker, the paper’s editor.

    By Monday, things had reached a fever pitch. Speaking in a television interview, Prime Minister David Cameron said that he knew the man’s name “like everybody else” and that the law on super-injunctions might need to be revisited. A curious aspect of British law is that legislators are allowed to say whatever they want in Parliament, within reason, without being sued for libel. By the same token, the news media can report the legislators’ remarks.

    So when Mr. Hemming rose and uttered the fatal words (“Ryan Giggs”) in the House of Commons on Monday, that seemed to invite the news media, finally, to print his name. Which they duly did on their Web sites.

    The Sun then went to the High Court, asking it to lift the injunction on the grounds that there seemed to be few people left who did not know Mr. Giggs was the man in question.

    But Justice Michael Tugendhat turned The Sun down, saying the Twitter campaign had actually demonstrated the need for the injunction.

    “The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the Internet confirms the fact that the claimant and his family need protection from intrusion into their private and family life,” the judge said.

    But Mr. Walker of The Sunday Herald said it was too late for all that.

    “You can’t imagine a worse outcome for him,” he said, speaking of Mr. Giggs. “Not only is he accused of sexual misadventure, but he’s become the antihero of the Twitter generation.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/wo.../24london.html

  7. #7
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    Eh, this article is from the New York Times, why would a newspaper in the US be stopped from publishing by an injunction from a British judge? Otherwise the idea that the internet, including twitter, makes this kind of law rather silly is right. It's the kind of law that's based in the idea that the boy can stop the flood with his finger in the dyke.
    Congratulations America

  8. #8
    The original objection to Superinjunctions was that only the rich could afford their protection, with it estimated to cost between £40,000 to £50,000 to raise one.

    The poor cannot afford such a luxury.

    ~

    The real irony in Superinjunctions occurred last month when a high-profile BBC TV journalist and presenter, Andrew Marr (who interviewed Obama 2 days ago ...), raised a Superinjunction to cover up his own supposed affair. There can be no greater hypocrisy in journalism than a journalist making attempts to cover up a story ... though he did later back-track.

    Quote Originally Posted by the guardian in april
    BBC presenter Andrew Marr said on Tuesday he had taken out a superinjunction to protect his family's privacy.

    Marr said he felt "uneasy" and "embarrassed" about the use of the high court injunction, which he won in 2008 to suppress reports of an extramarital affair.

    He said the use of the so-called rich man's gag "seems to be running out of control" and said he would no longer seek to prevent the story being published.

    Marr's decision to go public comes after Private Eye launched a challenge to the injunction last week.

    "I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists. Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes," Marr told the Daily Mail.

    But he added: "I also had my own family to think about, and I believed this story was nobody else's business.

    "I still believe there was, under those circumstances, no legitimate public interest in it."

    Marr, the BBC's former political editor who now presents a Sunday morning politics show on BBC1, said the use of injunctions seemed to be "running out of control".

    "There is a case for privacy in a limited number of difficult situations, but then you have to move on. They shouldn't be for ever and a proper sense of proportion is required," he added.

    His comments come amid a growing disquiet at the use by celebrities of injunctions and so-called superinjunctions to prevent media reporting of their private lives.

    At least 30 superinjunctions currently appear to be in place, including one relating to allegations of water pollution and another to a right-to-die case.

    Private Eye editor Ian Hislop said he had challenged the Marr injunction last week.

    "In a sense he led the pack because he was the most respectable of the people putting superinjunctions in," Hislop told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

    "But the principle remains wrong, which he knows, articulated once and should still believe."

    Hislop said he thought the superinjunction had been "a touch hypocritical" because Marr had written an article saying that parliament – not judges – should determine privacy law.

    "As a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist," he added.
    Last edited by Timbuk2; 05-24-2011 at 08:02 AM.
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  9. #9
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    Well, people need superinjunctions only if they don't live up to the standards they proclaim to live up to.
    Congratulations America

  10. #10
    I agree with the quote here, puerile as it may be:


    Spoiler:
    One injunction is meant to be about precisely that.


    Truth should be a defence under the law, the press should be able to print whatever they want under the provision that its true - barring issues of national security. That somebody had sex with someone else is not a security issue - don't want people to know about it? Don't do it. The courts should be there for libel/slander if its false but these are regarding stories that are true ... and very often were one party wants to tell the truth about their own lives, even if they are getting paid to "kiss and tell" why should they be gagged?

  11. #11
    Trying to agree on what constitutes national security is a pretty messy issue, if Finnish history can teach us anything.
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
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  12. #12
    Agreed it can. But sex is clearly not.

  13. #13
    The circumstances would necessarily be hilarious if it were, so barring extra-ordinary situations, no.

    An affair with a foreign head of state?
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
    I agree with the quote here, puerile as it may be:


    Spoiler:
    One injunction is meant to be about precisely that.


    Truth should be a defence under the law, the press should be able to print whatever they want under the provision that its true - barring issues of national security. That somebody had sex with someone else is not a security issue - don't want people to know about it? Don't do it. The courts should be there for libel/slander if its false but these are regarding stories that are true ... and very often were one party wants to tell the truth about their own lives, even if they are getting paid to "kiss and tell" why should they be gagged?
    If you don't want to do the walk, don't do the crime ?
    Congratulations America

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nessus View Post
    The circumstances would necessarily be hilarious if it were, so barring extra-ordinary situations, no.

    An affair with a foreign head of state?
    Well, it probably would have to be someone in the league of Kim Jong Il or Gaddafi.
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  16. #16
    If someone had an affair with a foreign head of state it'd be all the more important to know the truth.

    Specifics of pillow-talk may potentially be an issue of secrecy.

  17. #17
    An affair with a foreign intelligence agent?
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  18. #18
    Can anyone address the claim in the video that a US-style "first amendment" from the European Convention of Human Rights?

    EDIT: Well, I guess it would maybe conflict with Article 10 of the ECHR?

  19. #19
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    Hehe, this is another football player who likes to be fucked with a strap on ? There appear to be a lot of those.
    Congratulations America

  20. #20
    I'm torn on this issue. Freedom of speech and freedom of press on the one hand. Protecting people from harrassment and premature crucifixion by the assholes that make up most of the British press and the British public on the other hand. Oh sure we can laugh at famous people having affairs and thinking they may expect decency from the vicious idiots that are their fellow citizens... but as we said in the DSK thread and saw in eg. reports about the predicament of anyone even remotely suspected of pedophilia in the UK, what the media says and does can have harmful long-term consequences for people. Yeah, I'm no more inclined to defend that sort of thing than I am to defend footballers who have affairs
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  21. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    but as we said in the DSK thread and saw in eg. reports about the predicament of anyone even remotely suspected of pedophilia in the UK, what the media says and does can have harmful long-term consequences for people.
    Tough shit.

    If its false, sue.
    If its true, its your own fault.

  22. #22
    Yes I suppose there's no reason to care about pedophiles or alleged pedophiles your desire to talk tough is of no interest to me. Only a total jerk thinks it's a good thing for people to be endlessly harrassed by the travesty that is the British media and the hyenas that are the British people for things like having an affair "because it's their own fault". I'll concede that you have a point when it's about spreading important truths eg. about dangerous business practices (if I'm not mistaken that superinjunction on the Trafigura case was an old one that was revoked shortly after it became big news).
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  23. #23
    Yes, Trafigura was one injunction broken in Parliament. Another one was bizarrely a woman threatened with imprisonment for the crime of ... speaking to her MP!

    Call me a jerk but I respect free speech, I mean everything I've said.

  24. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
    Another one was bizarrely a woman threatened with imprisonment for the crime of ... speaking to her MP!
    Is this the one involving a "hyper-injunction" that specifically prohibits bypassing the gag-order by telling an MP? I agree, it's a little bizarre. Also dangerous if the allegations are true.

    Call me a jerk but I respect free speech, I mean everything I've said.
    I respect free speech as well. I only took issue with the moralizing and the callous dismissal of the problems that may stem from an unrestrained and oftentimes irresponsible free press. In the end we can conclude that, despite the harms, having a free press is better than not having one.

    We don't endorse capital punishment for toothpaste theft by arguing that it was the thief's fault and he had it coming.





    I'm trying to recall where we finally landed on the matter of wikileaks and the automatic classification of everything from nuclear missile launch codes to what the ambassador said about the king's moustache.
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  25. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    Is this the one involving a "hyper-injunction" that specifically prohibits bypassing the gag-order by telling an MP? I agree, it's a little bizarre. Also dangerous if the allegations are true.
    Yep that's it, a despicable act. Nothing in the EHRA should ever have been taken to mean that talking to an MP is illegal.
    I respect free speech as well. I only took issue with the moralizing and the callous dismissal of the problems that may stem from an unrestrained and oftentimes irresponsible free press. In the end we can conclude that, despite the harms, having a free press is better than not having one.
    There are issues regarding press, however there are bigger issues for having a "restrained and 'responsible' unfree press".
    We don't endorse capital punishment for toothpaste theft by arguing that it was the thief's fault and he had it coming.
    Only because most of us don't advocate capital punishment for theft, if we did then he did. I advocate jail for theft and if he got jailed for toothpaste theft then I would say it was the thief's fault and he had it coming.
    I'm trying to recall where we finally landed on the matter of wikileaks and the automatic classification of everything from nuclear missile launch codes to what the ambassador said about the king's moustache.
    I said it was not such a big deal and blown out of all proportion, that where it was not issues of security the press should be able to publish it and finally that leaks happen all the time anyway.

  26. #26
    I think I rather have a press that is not allowed to write about some private poop some star made then one that is not allowed to write about what is called 'national interests' or 'national security' or whatever name suits the government to hide something.
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  27. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    Yes I suppose there's no reason to care about pedophiles or alleged pedophiles your desire to talk tough is of no interest to me. Only a total jerk thinks it's a good thing for people to be endlessly harrassed by the travesty that is the British media and the hyenas that are the British people for things like having an affair "because it's their own fault". I'll concede that you have a point when it's about spreading important truths eg. about dangerous business practices (if I'm not mistaken that superinjunction on the Trafigura case was an old one that was revoked shortly after it became big news).
    I sympathize with the victims of harassment but. . . it doesn't matter, Minx. Dissemination of information *and misinformation* is just too easy. Securing information from being spread is too difficult to be worthwhile except in the most extreme cases. And for anything that is in some fashion in public view, trying to secure information is pretty much a waste of time no matter how extreme it is.
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