Celebrity Privacy v Press Freedom (Farcical UK Edition)
By Ryan Giggs v 75,000 Twitter users; Lib Dem MP comes to the rescue confirming what we already knew.
The use of the “injunction” or “super-injunction” is fairly common in the United Kingdom. It is essentially a preemptive gag order, through which one can prevent the media from reporting on an issue relevant to the individual in question. To the best of my knowledge, a super-injunction is distinguished from the more bog-standard variety where the former prevents the media source from even revealing the existence of the injunction itself. As freedom of the press is considerably less legally sacrosanct in the UK than in the USA, this comparative lack of protection for the press allows a Premiership soccer player, rich, famous, skilled, or otherwise, to preemptively gag the media from reporting on allegations regarding his “private” life.
The issue has been somewhat controversial this year (see a decent overview here) and all quite comically came to a head yesterday as outlined in the Guardian article linked above. That purveyor of truth and reason, The Sun, had been arguing in the High Court to have an injunction lifted against its reporting of an allegation of an extra-marital affair between Giggs and a reality TV star. Simultaneous to a hearing in court, a Lib Dem MP announced in Parliament that it was Giggs, confirming what 75,000 Twitter users, the foreign media, the Glasgow Sunday Herald (claiming that English / Welsh law doesn’t apply in Scotland), and David Cameron himself already knew (Cameron is quoted in the above-linked Independent article as saying he knew the identity “like everybody else”). Newspapers couldn’t even report the (not entirely clever) chants and taunts Blackpool fans directed at Giggs during the Man U v Blackpool match on Sunday.
As recently as Friday, the Giggs legal team was preparing to sue Twitter to reveal the identity of the 75,000 miscreants, presumably in order to sue them as well. The Sun duly lost its case, and even after the revelation in Parliament (thus allowing the media to report the words of the MP), the High Court judge on the case refused to lift the injunction, claiming (as quoted in the NYT article here) “The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the Internet confirms the fact that the claimant and his family need protection from intrusion into their private and family life”.
Essentially, the core question here is libel law; in the UK the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove she or he did not commit libel, whereas (my understanding at least) in the US the burden of proof is the opposite. Courts in the UK also have far less room to manoeuvre in terms of judicial review, which explains both the high court’s unwillingness to lift the injunction even after everybody knows, and the following quote by Justice Eady of the High Court:
“Should the court buckle every time one of its orders meets widespread disobedience or defiance? In a democratic society, if a law is deemed to be unenforceable or unpopular, it is for the legislature to make such changes as it decides are appropriate”.
The result is the sort of ludicrous hilarity that we witnessed yesterday.
