Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

The Rt Hon. Sir Nicholas Wall and Mr Justice Baker—Oral evidence (QQ 445–485)
Mr Justice Baker: The cases we deal with tend not to attract the level of publicity
that celebrity super-injunction cases attract. The Family Division does not have experience
of internet publicity, blogging and tweeting on the viral scale that occurred in the Giggs case
and other cases. Those using the internet to break an injunction made by a family court
judge are not the press, a public figure or a well-known blogger; it tends to be someone with
a much smaller following. The answer to your question is that in our jurisdiction the impact
of an internet breach of an injunction is less significant than a breach by a newspaper. Having
said that, newspapers hardly ever break these orders, whereas small breaches on the
internet are not uncommon.
Q466 Lord Dobbs: Can either of you conceive of any public interest justification
for breaching one of your injunctions?
Sir Nicholas Wall: I cannot see any reason.
Mr Justice Baker: No.
Q467 Lord Dobbs: Otherwise, you would not have granted them in the first
place, presumably.
Mr Justice Baker: Yes. The court has made an order having heard both sides and
provided for the press to be represented. The court has carried out its functions. That is
why you have courts.
Q468 Mr Bradshaw: Is Sir Nicholas at liberty to tell us a little more about the
Ireland–Germany case and its impact?
Sir Nicholas Wall: I can tell you in a few sentences. In the circumstances I was
forced to go public. The local authority came to me and said, “We cannot answer these
allegations without putting everything into the public domain.” The only thing I refused to
put into the public domain was the name of the child, although the name was in the public
domain in the sense that the breaches of the injunction had taken place. I decided that the
only way the record could be put straight was by publication. I was very concerned about it,
because it seemed to me that as a matter of principle one should not go public simply
because someone else has broken the rules. One either has rules that enable one to go
public properly or one does not. I found it a very difficult balance to strike. I was under
pressure to name the child. I declined to do so on the basis that the fact others had illicitly
named the child did not and should not entitle me to do so, but it was a very worrying
situation.
Q469 Lord Hollick: As you say, this is a present but growing problem. As more
and more people turn to the internet for their information, and as social media link
information so something of interest can be accessed very quickly, is there not a problem
where effectively there is a breach of an injunction that is widely available on the internet, at
which point the press say that it is so widely available why should not the injunction now be
lifted? How do you reconcile those issues?
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