The now abandoned Trafigura / Carter-Ruck "super injunction" saga and its associated Streisand effect continues:
This is the pathetic Government Written Answer to one of the Parliamentary Written Questions which were asked by Paul Farrelly MP at the same time as the one which Carter-Ruck attempted to suppress the reporting of:
[...]
Injunctions
Paul Farrelly: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will (a) collect and (b) publish statistics on the number of non-reportable injunctions issued by the High Court in each of the last five years. [293012]
Bridget Prentice: The information requested is not available. The High Court collects figures on applications, however injunctions are not separately identifiable, and there are currently no plans to amend databases to do so.
Why ever not ? Secret justice or injustice is utterly unacceptable in a democracy If such "non-reportable injunctions" (the term which is now popular in the media is the hyphenated "super-injunction") are really exceptional, then a careful note should be made of them, either by the UK Courts system or by the Ministry of Justice and statistics on their numbers etc. should be made public.
How long will the Labour (In)Justice Minister Jack Straw dither, before he actually does something about this ?
There is an attempt by the Carter-Ruck shysters and the Trafigura oil trading company to claimed that they never had any intention of trying to "gag" Parliament or the press, but nobody is likely to believe them, especially after they unsuccessfully tried to claim that the matter was now sub judice, also a ploy to stop Parliamentary discussion of it.
The Stockholm based whistleblower website wikileaks.org has published another Carter-Rick fax (to The Times legal department), which contains a copy of the Order by Mr Justice Tugendhat, which eases the restrictions which the previous Orders attempted to impose on Parliament.
This Order confirms the names of the Judges who issued the previous "super-injunctions" i.e.Mr. Justice Maddison and Mr.Justice Sweeney, but this latest Order itself raises some Questions about the competence of the senior Judiciary with respect to the Internet.and regarding the actual legal jurisdiction of the High Court of England and Wales.
Claim No HO09XX4132
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISIONBefore the Honourable Mr Justice Tugendhat on 13 October 2009
BETWEEN
(1) RJW
(2) SJWClaimants
- and -
(1) GUARDIAN NEWS AND MEDIA LIMITED
(2) THE PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN
who in or about September 2009 offered or supplied to the publishers of The Guardian and/or David Leigh a copy of,or information contained in or derived from, the document described in the Confidential Schedule C to this Order relating to the operation or affairs of the First Applicant and/or the Second Applicant
Defendants
N.B. the faxed copy has a High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Action Depart. rubber stamp mark of the 15th October - hardly evidence of "Internet speed" modern communications.
OrderThe learned judge having read correspondence between the Claimants and the First Defendant on 13 October 2009 agreeing to a variation of the Order of Mr Justice Sweeney of 18 September 2009 which extended the Order of Mr Justice Maddison of 11 September 2009.
IT IS ORDERED BY CONSENT that
The words "Ordered by Consent" torture the English language nonsensically.
An "Order" is not an "Agreement" or even a "Contract", which is what the word "Consent" implies in normal English.
1. Nothing in the Order of Maddison J of 11 September 2009 and/or the Sweeney J of 18 September 2009 shall prevent the First Defendant pr any other person from reorting or republishing information relating to:
i. any proceedings of the United Kingdom Parliament,including any information or matter published on the website www.parliament.uk
ii. any proceedings of the Scottish Parliament,including any information or matter published on the website www.scottish.parliament.uk
iii. any proceedings of the National Assembly for Wales including any information or matter published on the website www.assemblywales.org
or
iv. any proceedings of the Northern Ireland Assembly an any information or matter published on the website www.niassembly.gov.uk
2. The costs are reserved.
Dated this 13th day of October 2009
With regard to Mr. Justice Tugendhat's Order, there are some Questions which spring to mind:
- Why is the Scottish Parliament mentioned ? Surely the writ of the High Court of England and Wales does not extend to the Scottish Parliament ?
There have been newspaper stories published in Glasgow or Edinburgh, in defiance or, just as likely, ignorance of High Court injunctions made in London.
- Similarly the Members of the Legislative Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly should be asking why this Order attempts to usurp the jurisdiction of Her Majesty's High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland.
- What excuse is there for not mentioning the European Parliament, since, the UK Members of the European Parliament should enjoy the same Parliamentary Privileges as their Westminster colleagues ?
We are told that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but everyone involved seems to have forgotten the legal privileges of the European Parliament. Given that the Trafigura contaminated waste oil dumping scandal involves the authorities in the Netherlands as well as in the Ivory Coast, it is likely that Members of the the European Parliament may take an interest in toxic waste pollution regulations and in foreign affairs with the Ivory Coast.-
16.12.2004 EN Official Journal of the European Union C 310/263
7. PROTOCOL ON THE PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
Article 8
Members of the European Parliament shall not be subject to any form of inquiry, detention or legal proceedings in respect of opinions expressed or votes cast by them in the performance of their duties.
Article 9
During the sessions of the European Parliament, its members shall enjoy:
(a) in the territory of their own State, the immunities accorded to members of their Parliament;
(b) in the territory of any other Member State, immunity from any measure of detention and from
legal proceedings.Immunity shall likewise apply to members while they are travelling to and from the place of meeting of the European Parliament.
Immunity cannot be claimed when a member is found in the act of committing an offence and shall not prevent the European Parliament from exercising its right to waive the immunity of one of its members
- The Minton report itself, which is now no longer being suppressed, seems to be an initial scientific assessment of the hazards of the dumped toxic waste, which the experts subsequently re-evaluated, and downgraded the health risks of, once actual evidence of the illnesses and injuries caused in the Ivory Coast was available.
Since the criminal prosecutions of those involved in the illegal toxic waste dumping have happened or are in progress , not in the United Kingdom, but in the Ivory Coast and in the Netherlands (where Trafigura's tanker operations are based), why should the report somehow be legally privileged in the United Kingdom ?
The Ivory Coast or the Netherlands courts can make their own decisions on what is acceptable evidence and decide on whether or not reports in a foreign language newspaper somehow prejudice their local trials or not. Surely none of this is any business of, or within the jurisdiction of the High Court of England and Wales ?
Note also the specific mention of web site addresses, but without any understanding of the alternative formats.
It is unclear if the Judge is, or is not, now allowing access to the banned information or documents published via variants of the www.parliament.uk website address e.g. http://www.parliament.uk or http://www.parliament.uk/ or http://194.60.39.77 or http://194.60.39.77:80 or http://3258722125 or http://0xc23c274d etc.
Neither is there any appreciation that a website might be or accessed via multiple reverse proxy servers clusters, load balancers etc which are common on high traffic, high availability websites.
There seems to be no concept of non-world wide web file sharing and publishing e.g. peer to peer file-sharing, file transfer protocol, request a file via email, Tor hidden services etc..
This sort of legal sloppiness with web site addresses will come back to haunt the Judiciary when they attempt to ban specific websites.
While I agree with most of your post, this
isn't correct...What it means is that the parties agreed the terms of the Order in advance and so all the Court does is rubber-stamp it.
@ D-Notice - that would be true if the Order only affected the named parties i.e. the (secret) Claimants and Defendants, but Mr. Justice Maddison's "super injunction", which was presumably renewed by Mr. Justice Sweeney and Mr. Justice Tugendhat's variation thereof affected all the rest of us, who were not asked for, and who did not give our "Consent" to any of the conditions and restrictions.
Being "Ordered by Consent" still seems to be a self-contradictory abuse of English.
The oreder doesn't purport to constrain the Scottish Parliament. The reference to the Scottish Parliament simply says that the order does not prevent the Guardian from publishing anything that is part of the proceedings of the Scottish parliament or has been published on the Scottish Parliament's website.
Actually I imagine you understood this perfectly, but took the attitude that the facts shouldn't be allowed to get in the way. But maybe you should have stuck with the facts: there's plenty wrong with the original order, there's no need to accuse the amending order of purporting to do something it certainly doesn't (and certainly couldn't) do and making that false accusation detracts from the credibility and trustworthiness of your whole article.
@ - cmt - what "false accusation" exactly ?
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