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English Libel Law (Parliamentary Proceedings)

I am pleased to have secured this debate, which deals with some important issues: parliamentary privilege, the reporting of Parliament, the use of prior restraint in actions relating to libel and, indeed, confidence, the use of so-called super-injunctions that impose restraint on the reporting of the existence of such injunctions, the extent to which public interest is engaged when such injunctions and super-injunctions are issued, and the general approach of libel laws in particular, bound up as they all are. I draw the Chamber's attention to my membership of the international board of Article 19, which campaigns for press freedom around the world. In the run-up to this debate, I convened helpful meetings with The Guardian and Carter-Ruck solicitors, which several hon. and right hon. Members in the Chamber—as well as Members not here—attended, and we had a useful discussion. I record my gratitude to those people who came to those meetings from Carter-Ruck and The Guardian. I particularly thank The Guardian for its assistance in providing me, other hon. Members and members of the public with background details of the case. I also thank Carter-Ruck for acceding to a request to provide us with the correspondence from its point of view between the dates of the initial injunction and the second injunction. It may be useful to run briefly through the chronology of events that led to last week's point of order, and of which we are all aware. I will not go into them in detail, because other hon. Members may wish to do so—and I know that many of them want to speak—so I shall try to keep my comments as brief as possible. An injunction was issued by Justice Maddison on Friday 11 September, effectively preventing The Guardian from publishing what it had—a copy of the Minton report relating to the alleged impact of Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. I imagine that it had a number of other documents as well. Not only was that injunction issued but it had a super-injunction aspect, which meant that it was effectively anonymised, and the respondents were prevented from reporting the existence of the injunction itself. The application was pursued and extended on 18 September. Things changed on 12 October, when The Guardian wrote to Carter-Ruck, which was acting for Trafigura, alerting it to the fact that a series of written questions had been tabled by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), and indicating that it wanted to publish them, either because they were in the public domain or—and I am not giving The Guardian's view here—because they should not be covered by the injunction itself, being the reporting of parliamentary proceedings. Carter-Ruck solicitors wrote back on 12 October, objecting to the publication. They stated that the matter was not urgent, and their view that the questions themselves had not placed the contents of the Minton report in the public domain, so that certainly should not be covered. They also stated in a letter to Mr. Speaker their view that publishing the parliamentary questions would place The Guardian in contempt of court, because of the order that prevented—injuncted—the publication of the existence of the injunction, which was the subject of the parliamentary questions tabled by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme. Extended correspondence over the next two days between The Guardian and Carter-Ruck resulted in agreement that a variation to the order would be sought to exclude reporting of parliamentary proceedings. By that time, The Guardian had been prevented on at least one occasion from publishing what it wanted to publish, which was at the very least the existence of the parliamentary questions and what they contained. A number of things flow from that, and I want to cover them briefly. The first is whether an injunction can prevent a matter from being debated in Parliament and/or the reporting of matters in Parliament. The second is whether Carter-Ruck's approach in its correspondence was appropriate to what many hon. Members believe to be the position—that the reporting of Parliament should be freely, truthfully and fairly reportable without any intervention or restriction by the courts or any other party. The third concerns super-injunctions, their frequency, and whether judges are considering the wider public interest when granting injunctions or super-injunctions. The fourth is whether libel laws in this country are too wide, a matter to which the Lord Chief Justice no less referred yesterday.