Reporting privacy injunctions: a response from Gideon Benaim

I recently asked a couple of questions about reporting anonymised privacy injunctions, following a piece by Gideon Benaim in the Guardian. Benaim, a partner at Michael Simkins LLP, has responded with a full blog post response, which is published on Inforrm here. He argues:

It isn’t necessary to publish information about specific cases contemporaneously, nor to publish to the world at large at any time the “not so basic” details of a specific case, in the way that the courts have started to do. The Practice Direction can be amended to oblige practitioners to provide the required basic information to a central office in the High Court. Transparency is possible through statistics without needing to draw attention to individuals at the time they obtain the injunction.

I’ve left a comment below the piece, asking whether the open justice principle in fact requires the publication of basic detail about contemporaneous privacy judgments, which mimics a question put by Edward Thompson in the Journal of Media Law last December, in relation to cameras in court. I am not attempting to provide an answer at this stage, but am interested in hearing what other people think.

This entry was posted in courts, data, digital open justice, media law, newspapers, privacy, public interest, reporting restrictions and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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