Leaders defend right to publish

Tuesday 24 May 2011

ALEX Salmond and David Cameron yesterday defended the right of The Herald's sister paper, the Sunday Herald, to print Ryan Giggs' name in an article about super-injunctions.

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CHRIS WATT politics

First Minister Alex Salmond said it would be extremely foolish for the Attorney General in England to launch proceedings against the title, the first mainstream publication in the UK to circumvent a super-injunction.

On reports the English legal authorities would pursue the Sunday Herald, which published its front page article at the weekend after Giggs’ name had already been spread across the internet, Mr Salmond said: “I think it would be very, very unlikely that an Attorney General would be as foolish as to do so … I think the political issue is whether it is tenable to pursue this sort of injunction.

“I would have thought there is an increasing view it is untenable to do so. There is a whole question of what is of interest to the public and what is in the public interest, which can often be different things.“But the law essentially is a practical thing. It looks to me like English law and English injunctions are increasingly impractical in the modern world.”Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, would be bound to look into complaints about the article if they were referred to him, but he indicated yesterday that he had little interest in doing so.In response to a question from Nationalist MP Elidh Whiteford, he said: “Scotland enjoys, and has always enjoyed, a separate legal system. And it follows from that that orders made by the courts of England and Wales, generally speaking, do not have application there, although there are at times some exceptions.”Paul McBride, QC, one of the Sunday Herald’s legal advisers, has repeatedly made clear that the paper “did not breach the order, as some have suggested, but simply wasn’t covered by it”.He has now called on Parliament to look at the issue of super-injunctions in general, saying: “We can’t have unelected judges making these decisions in private when we have the internet out there where everyone can access the information they’re trying to keep secret.“We had the absurd position this week of even MPs in our democratically-elected Parliament being threatened with potential contempt of court by using their parliamentary privilege to name people. That’s not acceptable any more.”Giggs was named yesterday by Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, using parliamentary privilege.Earlier, Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that it was not workable to gag newspapers while internet users flaunt injunctions with glee. “It is rather unsustainable, this situation, where newspapers can’t print something that clearly everybody else is talking about, but there’s a difficulty here because the law is the law and the judges must interpret what the law is,” he said. “What I’ve said in the past is, the danger is that judgments are effectively writing a new law which is what Parliament is meant to do. “So I think the Government, Parliament, has got to take some time out, have a proper look at this, have a think about what we can do, but I’m not sure there is going to be a simple answer.”He suggested a stronger Press Complaints Commission might be an answer, putting a voluntary burden on publications to uphold high standards.“It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t, so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today.”The Sunday Herald’s report did not find favour with all those it touched, however.Sir Alex Ferguson, Giggs’ manager at Manchester United, apparently blamed the storm for his failure to attend a funeral in his home city yesterday.He was supposed to attend the service for former Scottish Football Association chairman Ernie Walker, but Mr Walker’s son told mourners in Glasgow: “Sir Alex phoned me at 9 o’clock this morning to say, due to circumstances as reported in the Sunday Herald, he was unable to attend because he is required to stay in Manchester today to deal with the fall-out.”

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Leaders defend right to publish

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