Media Publishing in UK Law

It is not for me to lay down practice directions, but what I can say is that a proper consideration for the Article 10 rights of media publishers, and indeed their rights under Article 6 as well, would require that where a litigant intends to serve a prohibitory injunction upon one or more of them, in reliance on the Spycatcher principle, those individual publishers should be given a realistic opportunity to be heard on the appropriateness or otherwise of granting the injunction, and upon the scope of its terms.

One consequence would be that the Spycatcher doctrine would go on inhibiting third parties from publishing the relevant information notionally pending a trial which would never actually take place. The Spycatcher doctrine, as a matter of logic, has no application to a permanent injunction since, obviously, there is no longer any need to preserve the status quo pending a trial.

It seems to me that the obligation to serve them must, as a matter of common sense and economy, be confined to those media organisations whom the claimant has reason to believe have displayed an interest in publishing the story which the claimant is seeking to injunct.

The problem with this approach by Mr Jorro is that if he were correct and IWCP were in reality to be so disliked by other parties that its members at any level were at real risk in the post Saddam era, there should be by now some clear evidence of it that goes beyond the jockeying for position by all the political parties within the new democratic process.

The discretion to hear disputes, even in the area of public law, must, however, be exercised with caution and appeals which are academic between the parties should not be heard unless there is a good reason in the public interest for doing so, as for example (but only by way of example) when a discrete point of statutory construction arises which does not involve detailed consideration of facts and where a large number of similar cases exist or are anticipated so that the issue will most likely need to be resolved in the near future.

Nowadays we regard time very differently from what they did in the 19th century. We have had occasion recently to dismiss many cases for want of prosecution when people have not kept to the rules as to time. So here, although the time is not so very long, it is quite long enough. There was ample time for considering whether there should be an appeal or not. Moreover (and this is important), not a single ground or excuse is put forward to explain the delay and why he did not appeal.

My Lords, I would not deny that in some respects an English court would be admirably suitable for this purpose. But that does not mean that we should always put ourselves forward as the most appropriate forum in which any foreign publisher who has distributed copies in this country, or whose publications have been downloaded here from the internet, can be required to answer the complaint of any public figure with an international reputation, however little the dispute has to do with England.