Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Global Witness—Written evidence
Global Witness—Written evidence
Global Witness welcomes the opportunity to submit its written evidence to the Joint
Committee.
Global Witness is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that exposes the corrupt
exploitation of natural resources, its links to wars and to international trade systems. We
obtain evidence which we use to drive campaigns that end impunity, resource-linked conflict
and human rights and environmental abuses. Global Witness was co-nominated for the 2003
Nobel Peace Prize for its work on conflict diamonds.
Our investigative and reporting work tackles important public interest issues such as funding
of conflict, political and corporate corruption, and the functioning of organised crime. This
work has been impeded by the threats that the current UK privacy law allows: powerful
claimants, (often with no connection to the UK), threatening to initiate unfounded privacy
actions against organisations such as ours who reveal the unflattering truth about them.
Furthermore, the UK legal system is characterised by disproportionately high costs which
can be prohibitive for non profit organisations. The high cost of defending even a vexatious
and unfounded legal action can have a potential self censoring effect. For such organisations,
unlike for big newspapers, settling as a regular practice is simply not an option.
Global Witness is very pleased that a new Joint Committee has been appointed to consider
privacy and injunctions. We consider that there is a tendency to characterise the privacy
and injunction debate in the context of publications by the tabloid press. This
characterisation fails to recognise the important work that Global Witness and other NGOs
carry out on matters of vital and overwhelming public interest such as global corruption,
state looting, armed conflict and human rights abuses. For a long time, only media
organisations have been considered relevant in the debate as defenders of freedom of
expression, and we believe that the important role of NGOs must be also be recognised.
We have elected to provide evidence in respect of two specific questions which are
relevant to our own experience:
(2) A. Have there been and are there currently any problems with the balance
struck in law between freedom of expression and the right to privacy?
1. We believe that current privacy laws do not cater for the inequality of arms
between non-media organisation publishers and often wealthy and powerful complainants.
The law's failure to take this inequality into account operates, in practice, to place the
balance too far in favour of the right to privacy of potentially corrupt individuals to the
detriment of the public’s right to know and freedom of expression.
2. Among the many threats that Global Witness faces, legal action is one of the more
frequent - including breach of privacy. The corrupt politicians and businessmen whom we
target in our investigations are often enormously rich, and can afford to use the law to
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