Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

Chris Huhne MP’s partner Carina Trimingham has lost her privacy claim against Associated Newspapers, with Tugendhat J refusing permission to appeal ( EWHC1296 (QB)). Her claim related to 65 articles and three separate statutes: misuse of private information pursuant to the Human Rights Act 1998 and ECHR Art 8; the Protection from Harassment Act 1997; and the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, s.97, …

Read more… 2,123 more words

Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

Module three of the Leveson Inquiry is now underway, examining the relationship between press and politicians. Jack Straw, Lord Wakeham, Alastair Campbell and Sir Harold Evans were among the witnesses during the Inquiry’s 19th week, as Natalie Peck summarised here.

Read more… 1,959 more words

Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

A high-profile week at the Leveson Inquiry, with evidence from Rebekah Brooks, the MailOnline editor Martin Clarke and Andy Coulson (see Natalie Peck’s Inforrm roundup).  As well as sharing David Cameron’s text-speak (lol), Brooks provided the inquiry with an email sent to her by News Corp’s head of communications, Frederic Michel.

Read more… 2,656 more words

With the Justice and Security Bill due soon, some interesting issues are arising around the use of closed material proceedings in Employment Tribunals. Under Rule 54 of the regulations that govern procedure, closed proceedings and the exclusion of a party and their legal representative can be used in Crown employment matters if it is ‘expedient in the interests of national security’.

In April, it was reported in the Telegraph that there is a current action against GCHQ. On 12 May, the Telegraph reported on an action against the Metropolitan Police related to the suspicion of a police officer having attended terrorist training camp, the suspension of the officer’s counter-terrorism security clearance, and the legal proceedings in the Employment Tribunal.

In that matter – Rahman v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis & the Secretary of State for the Home Department (UKEATPA/0076/09/RN & UKEAT/0125/10/RN) – Mitting J has said that there is ‘a legitimate public interest in those parts of the proceedings from which the Appellant and his legal representatives are not excluded’ and ‘cogent reasons’ would be needed to exclude the public.

(It might be said that even if the public can be excluded whenever the Appellant has no access, there is nonetheless still a legitimate public interest in all aspects of these proceedings.)  However, it seems clear from the judgment that closed proceedings will play a very substantial role in this case.

The Employment Tribunal matters are interesting not only of themselves but also because the Justice and Security Green Paper cites it as a jurisdiction where closed material proceedings are well established, and thus it forms part of the normalising landscape within which general closed material proceedings are said by the government to be acceptable.

However, as with all closed material proceedings in existing areas, including SIAC, there seems no record of how often they are used. The MP for Tooting, Sadiq Khan, has asked the Justice Secretary to answer on 14 May the question: ‘on how many occasions a closed material procedure has been used in an employment tribunal in each of the last 10 years’.  It is an important question.

Moreover, any proposals in the Justice and Security Bill should ensure that such records are kept and reported regularly, and that all orders for closure are reviewed periodically so that matters of public interest do not remain secret for any longer than absolutely necessary.

Lawrence McNamara runs the ESRC-funded Law, Terrorism and the Right to Know project at the University of Reading.

But what about opening up justice online? The new issue of the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers features my article summing up the ‘Open Justice in the Digital Era’ project at the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism, and the forthcoming ‘Justice Wide Open’ working papers. Appropriately, as of this month, access to the journal is free online [print subscription details here].

I argue that our project raises important questions to be teased out and properly considered by legal authorities and government, in consultation with the public, researchers and the media. In that sense, our project is a call for debate as well as action.

Read the article in full here.

Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

The big media law story of the week was the culture, media and sport select committee’s report into phone hacking [PDF] and one line in particular: its conclusion that “Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company“.  The committee found that its 2010 report on press standards was partially based on false evidence which had been intended to cover up the extent of the phone hacking scandal; its findings are summarised…

Read more… 2,210 more words

I am primarily interested in defamation and privacy claims; some information can be obtained from the courts when you know what you’re looking for. You can start to build up a patchwork picture through Ministry of Justice releases, law reports, news articles, law firm updates, journal articles, legal conferences, published judgments, blogs and social media. But clear quantitative data at source is tricky to come by and, as I’ve pointed out many times before (eg.), a lot of the information is behind legal paywalls.

For example, in August 2011 the Inforrm blog took a Sweet and Maxwell report to task for its statistics on the number of online defamation cases, arguing “the figures are curious and their precise provenance unclear”. Inforrm suggests some other sources of data: the MoJ’s annual stats on number of defamation claims and a very useful table showing the number of defamation writs since 1990, supplied by RPC’s Jaron Lewis. But further breakdown is difficult to come by.

I am currently gathering supplementary information about defamation and privacy claims through interviews with media lawyers, as part of my doctoral research (please email me if you’re interested in participating: judith.townend.1 [at] city.ac.uk).

I spotted on WhatDoTheyKnow.com that a user (Anna) had asked what might seem a reasonable question through FoI, inquiring about “the numbers of cases of online defamation concerning businesses/corporations” and the names of the businesses involved.

I didn’t hold out much hope for her! First of all, the Government Office for Science Business, Innovation & Skills, where she originally directed her inquiry in February 2012, replied on 6 March 2012 (my emphasis):

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) holds has some statistics on defamation – specifically the number of claims issued. The latest published stats are for 2010 and are available on their website at the following link: http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/statistics-and-data/courts-and-sentencing/high-court-queens-bench.xls. MoJ has no breakdown of the statistics beyond that either in terms of the number of cases that result from defamation online, or the number that involve corporations. 

Then, on 11 April 2012, Anna re-submitted the request to the Ministry of Justice, which replied on 2 May [reply in full here]:

Your request has been handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). I can confirm that the Department holds some of the information you have requested. However, I am sorry to inform you that from my preliminary assessment of your request, it is clear that I will not be able to answer your request in full without breaching the section 12 cost limit under the Act.

No surprises there.

It may help if I explain that the Ministry of Justice Court Proceedings Database holds information on defendants proceeded against, found guilty and sentenced for criminal offences in England and Wales. This database holds information on offences provided by the statutes under which proceedings are brought but not all the specific circumstances of each case.

Well, not really: her request concerned civil not criminal data…

Other than where specified in a statute it is not possible to identify from centrally held data, for example, in cases proceeded against for publishing defamatory libel under Common Law, the specific form in which the publication allegedly occurred, i.e. whether the publication was made online, including social networks like Facebook or Twitter. This detailed information may be held by the courts on individual case files which due to their size and complexity are not reported to Justice Statistics Analytical Services…

My emphasis again.

…In this instance to provide you with the information you seek we would be required to contact all the courts in England and Wales and ask them to search individual case files. To confirm whether the Ministry of Justice holds the information you require on the scale that you have requested would therefore exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ set out in section 12(1) of the FOIA.

For Anna’s purposes this could be limited to the High Court.

…. Whilst you could narrow the scope of your request in order to try and bring it within the cost limit, for example by requesting information for a particular magistrates’ court, I would like to take this opportunity to advise you that it is very likely that any information that may be held within scope of your request may be exempt from disclosure under the FOIA under the terms of Section 32 (Court Records). Therefore it is likely that any subsequent narrowed request could be refused under Section 32.

A magistrates’ court wouldn’t be very useful in terms of tracking libel claims. And finally, the issue of Section 32, quoted below (my emphasis):

Section 32 exempts information contained in certain litigation documents and court, tribunal and inquiry records and will apply regardless of the content of the information. There are separate and specific regimes for gaining access to court and tribunal records and section 32 ensures that those regimes are not superseded by the FOI Act.

Key points:

• Section 32 will apply only if the public authority concerned holds the information solely because it was contained in one of the specified documents.
• Section 32 applies regardless of the content of the information
• The application of section 32 is not subject to any public interest balance.

If you’ve got any bright ideas for Anna and other people interested in this area, please do comment below, or drop me an email. I’ll address the issue of counting/tracking privacy claims in due course.

Related links:

• Lucy Series and I wrote a submission to the Cabinet Office’s open data consultation
• The Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism ‘Open Justice in the Digital Era’ project

Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

It was the week the newspaper proprietors came to Leveson. Predictably, Murdochs Snr and Jnr dominated the media coverage, but John Ryley (head of news, Sky News) Aidan Barclay (Telegraph Media Group) and Evgeny Lebedev (Lebedev Holdings Ltd) also supplied plenty of fresh material for the Leveson correspondents. Natalie Peck reported for Inforrm here.

Read more… 1,603 more words

“Thinking of putting forward a session at #TAL12 on hyperlocals and crime. Reporting it, legal stuff and why you should do it. Of interest?” @ed_walker86

The small group of hyperlocal publishers discussed their individual approaches to crime reporting, and it raised – in my view – pertinent questions about best practice and ethics in the digital era, as well as access to police and courts information.

Delegates had already been briefed on contempt of court by David Banks in a morning session, so this session focused on the how and why, rather than the legal parameters [for a quick and cheap guide to reporting criminal courts, you could look at Sarah Chapman's e-book; for a more in-depth advice see McNae's Essential Law for Journalists].

Ed suggested some of the reasons we might report courts on local news sites, including reader interest and community benefit (my paraphrasing – he might like to elaborate in comments below).

In our discussion, hyperlocal publishers described how they reported crime and some of the issues that had cropped up. One publisher said that since they couldn’t attend court (an issue of blogger manpower), they waited for a result before reporting on a case. A couple of people described occasions when they were asked to remove information relating to specific cases, by individuals named in a published crime report.

A few specific incidents particularly interested me, which I’ll follow up and possibly report in more detail in due course – or please add comments below, if you’ve got relevant examples to share.

In view of the concerns being raised, I mentioned our ‘Open Justice in the Digital Era‘ initiative at the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism (CLJJ), City University London. In a forthcoming publication, a range of journalists, lawyers and academics discuss the path ahead for the digitisation of courts and legal information.

It will include founder of Talk About Local William Perrin’s ‘Courts Transparency Charter‘, which has sparked some debate around the issues of privacy, rehabilitation of offenders and data protection.

Following the publication of the working papers, the CLJJ is planning to discuss some of the proposals in more detail, to feed into recommendations for the Ministry of Justice and the judiciary and other relevant bodies.

We’d love to hear from hyperlocal publishers. The session on Saturday, at least, indicated that there might be some divergence from a typical journalistic approach (due to resources and mission of the sites) and it seems sensible to include these views in any discussion going forward.

Please contact me via:

• jt.townend [at] gmail [dot] com (for Meeja Law related inquiries)
• judith.townend.1 [at] city.ac.uk (for open justice project inquiries)
• More information about the open justice initiative at bit.ly/openjustice

Or leave a comment below! Thanks to the organisers, Talk About Local and the online community noticeboard n0tice, for an excellent and thought-provoking day.

There was a parallel session on the ‘Hyperlocal Alliance‘ which I missed, but understand that it picked up on the theme of hyperlocal regulation, which I covered in my last post and Damian Radcliffe covered here on the Democratic Society blog.