Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Rt Hon Dominic Grieve QC MP, Attorney General—Oral evidence (QQ 1070–1102)
They may have been in contempt of court, but the question arises whether it is in the public
interest in criminal cases to use the rather more draconian sanction to prosecute them for
contempt. I do not really see them as being a separate category of individual or organisation
that might commit a contempt, although clearly when looking at national newspapers with
large-scale circulations, certainly in the case of criminal contempt, they have an
acknowledged responsibility, of which they are well aware, about how they conduct their
affairs, and I expect them to maintain high standards.
That said, as I have made quite clear on a number of occasions, certainly in criminal
contempt, individuals who decide to tweet or blog in defiance of orders had better beware,
because one day somebody will end up being prosecuted and will discover to their
consternation that there are quite severe sanctions that can be visited upon them for what
they have done.
Q1077 Lord Dobbs: That is very interesting. Some witnesses have thrown up
their hands in horror and said, “It’s so difficult that there is nothing we can really do about
it”, which is not something to which I personally adhere. To what extent does the
jurisdictional question cause you problems? We have had before us very substantial, largescale
bloggers who say, “It doesn’t matter what you guys do. We’re going to take ourselves
off to another jurisdiction and stick up two fingers at you.”
Mr Grieve: I accept it is possible. It was always possible to publish a newspaper in
the United States or another jurisdiction which contained material that might be in
contempt of court. Somebody could, even inadvertently, bring it in as part of their luggage
and it might be circulated. It would be very difficult to bring proceedings against those
individuals, so in a sense the modern problem with bloggers and tweeters is not really all
that different. Clearly, there is an issue about enforcement, but the fact enforcement may
be a bit more difficult and there may be instances where you cannot do anything about it
does not mean the power has no merit. After all, if you decide to blog in the United States
in defiance of court orders and you are identified, maybe there is nothing I can do about it,
but if the person ever visits the United Kingdom, or certainly England and Wales, there
might well be.
Ultimately, trying to maintain a balance in this area is not to my mind dependent on
running around and showing that you have a 100% success rate, but showing that the
enforcement process and, dare I say, the dialogue with people to persuade those who might
be minded to do this that it is not in the public interest are sufficiently successful that this
sort of behaviour is at least being reasonably deterred so that the justice system can
function properly.
Lord Dobbs: That is refreshing and reassuring.
Q1078 Martin Horwood: One of the problems with social media, in particular
Facebook and Twitter, is that you can have an original breach of an injunction or superinjunction
by the person who sets up a Facebook group, or does the first tweet on a
subject, but then potentially you have tens of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people
who “like” the Facebook group, re-tweet, or even do subsequent tweets and who, almost
by definition, cannot have any knowledge of the super-injunction and may be doing the same
as a newspaper does when it puts something in quotation marks. For instance, if there was
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