Company Informants and Disclosure of Journalistic Sources: Goodwin v United Kingdom
| Date | 01 February 1997 |
| Pages | 351-354 |
| Published date | 01 February 1997 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb025804 |
| Author | Sandeep Savla |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Financial Crime — Vol. 4 No. 4 — Investigations
Company Informants and Disclosure of
Journalistic Sources: Goodwin v United Kingdom
Sandeep Savla
It may be a trite observation that the European
Court of Human Rights is concerned with the
preservation of individual rights, but the extent to
which individual rights are to be asserted when
faced with competing claims is not so clear. To
what extent, for example, are competing rights and
interests or the incidental costs of the individual
right to be weighed in the balance so as to override
that individual right? This issue arose in
Goodwin
v
United Kingdom,1 where the European Court of
Human Rights considered whether a company
could obtain disclosure of a journalist's notes of a
conversation with an informant who had obtained
information from a stolen confidential business
plan belonging to the company. The judgment of
the European Court is important on a substantive
level but of equal importance is the adjudicative
process employed by the European Court, since an
examination of this may reveal the manner in
which the Court deals with competing claims.
The judgment of the European Court marked
the culmination of events that began in November
1989,
when Mr William Goodwin, a journalist for
The Engineer journal, received a telephone call from
an anonymous person who revealed confidential
and sensitive information regarding a company
named Tetra Ltd. Given the nature of the informa-
tion and the timing of the communication, it was a
logical inference that this informant had obtained
the information from a business plan stolen from
the company and that the informant had either
stolen the plan or was closely associated with that
person. Mr Goodwin telephoned Tetra Ltd in
order to confirm various facts prior to publication,
and Tetra Ltd proceeded to obtain an ex parte
interim injunction restraining the publishers from
publishing the information derived from the busi-
ness plan. Tetra Ltd also sought an order for dis-
closure of the notes which Mr Goodwin had made
of his conversation with the informant as a means
of ascertaining the identity of that person.
The case was heard by the House of Lords as X
Page 351
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