Unecessary Star Trek reference in the title aside, I wanted to blog today about a new and extremely serious development in super injunctions which are essentially gagging orders for journalists. It is today the front page story in the Daily Mail that a TV star (who, because of the injunction cannot be named) has won a High Court injunction that will suppress forever apparently intimate photos of him with a woman who planned to sell the story.
It is the latest story with such draconian rulings just one day after another celebrity was granted a super injunction over an affair with a colleague to protect his family. The ruling of a permanent gagging order and injunction is, say the Daily Mail "similar to the protection orders hiding the identities of James Bulger's murderers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. In these cases the murderers were deemed to be in danger of being attacked if the public found out who and where they were following their release from prison." So what would happen to this celebrity were his identity ever known?
The Mail goes on to say that "effectively it hands another legal weapon to the wealthy seeking to hide their failings from the public." The Judge at the centre of this and almost all injunction rulings is a Mr Justice Eady who declared he had the power to grant a permanent 'contra mundum' injunction which translated from the latin means 'against the world'. In this case it would mean the case is never ending and applies to anyone and everyone. Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming who is campaigning against the use of injunctions said: "I am suprised the judge limited himself to silencing the world. Why not the whole Solar System?'
For the full story please read the original article on the Daily Mail website here.
For a look into the history of the UK's current privacy law on the BBC website click here.
For a more detailed blog I wrote on the subject of confidentiality click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment