“A council is seeking to privately prosecute two dozen protesters for obstructing bailiffs during the eviction of Dale Farm, after police and the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge them.”
The Guardian, 18th May 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
“The Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of Stockton Council to allow it to proceed with the demolition of Billington House, the former headquarters of chemical company ICI, and now a derelict office block.”
OUT-LAW.com, 11th May 2012
Source: www.out-law.com
“False reports to the police are rare. Most complaints are truthful and accurate and amount to a proper grievance. However, there are some that are either false or wild exaggerations of the truth. There are yet more that may well be true but amount only to such a trivial complaint that a reasonable person would not think it worthy of the attention of the authorities. The subject of such reporting has hitherto had limited redress in law. Unless the Crown were wiling to prosecute the accuser the chances of retribution were small. The case of Waxman has brought to notice an area of civil redress.”
One Inner Temple Lane, 1st May 2012
Source: www.1itl.com
“The UK’s intellectual property (IP) framework is one of the worst in the world in terms of serving the interests of the public, a new report has said.”
OUT-LAW.com, 27th April 2012
Source: www.out-law.com
“Ofcom has launched an investigation into the hacking of private email accounts by Sky News.”
BBC News, 23rd April 2012
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
“Keir Starmer QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), has today published interim guidelines on the approach prosecutors should take when assessing the public interest in cases affecting the media.”
Crown Prosecution Service, 18th April 2012
Source: www.cps.gov.uk
“Journalists should appear before a court of law to make a public interest defence for stories obtained by unlawful newsgathering techniques, the information commissioner has said.”
The Guardian, 12th April 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
“Sky News’s decision to approve the hacking of emails belonging to John Darwin, the once-missing, presumed-dead ‘canoe man’, can be argued to be one of those finely balanced editorial decisions. The public interest argument runs fairly straightforwardly, after all. Darwin pleaded guilty to deception in March 2008 – you will recall he went out to sea in a canoe and somehow paddled his way from the north-east to the Panama canal, suggesting he was not so dead after all. But his wife, Anne, was going to trial – a life insurance policy had been cashed in by her – and it was at that point Sky’s journalist, Gerard Tubb, was given the green light to try to access John Darwin’s email communications. As he did so, he uncovered information that made it clear that Anne Darwin was in on the plot, and having shared this with Cleveland police, the broadcaster believes it helped secure her conviction and produced a very detailed post-conviction backgrounder.”
The Guardian, 8th April 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
“The public interest in publishing a risk assessment of the NHS overhaul in England is ‘very high, if not exceptional’, a tribunal has ruled.”
BBC News, 5th April 2012
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
“The Bar Council, which represents barristers in England and Wales, has called for the Government to amend further the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to protect civil liberties and open justice.”
The Bar Council, 4th April 2012
Source: www.barcouncil.org.uk
“The 15-year-old who killed his mother was named to deter similar terrible crimes. But is such publicity counterproductive?”
The Guardian, 5th April 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
“Since 18th August 2008 there has been an offence on the statute books which effectively criminalises what in many cases amount to little more than minor errors of judgement; this offence carries with it the prospect of the alleged offender being sent to prison for anything up to five years. Section 2B of the Road Traffic Act 1988 (inserted by the Road Safety Act 2006) introduced motorists to the offence of causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving. It was undoubtedly enacted because of increased public (and tabloid) disquiet about the previous alternative to the more serious offence of causing death by dangerous driving (s1 RTA 1988); this was, of course, the much less serious charge of careless and inconsiderate driving (s3 RTA 1988), which carried only a financial penalty and a discretionary disqualification from driving. Since the implementation of s2B RTA 1988, however, the prosecuting authorities have become increasingly keen to charge drivers with this offence; indeed, matters now appear to have reached the point where their default position seems to be that simply because a fatality arises from a road traffic collision, then a prosecution must follow, irrespective of where the fault for the collision lies. The exercise of any proper judgement as to whether it is in the public interest to pursue a prosecution in
many such cases seems to have completely evaporated.”
Full story (PDF)
Zenith Chambers, 27th March 2012
Source: www.zenithchambers.co.uk
“The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR recently tackled the question of whether the police tactic of ‘kettling’ (verb, UK, of the police – to contain demonstrators in a confined area) amounted to a deprivation of the liberty of four applicants within the meaning of Article 5(1) of the ECHR.”
UK Human Rights Blog, 2nd April 2012
Source: www.ukhumanrightsblog.com
“New legislation should be introduced to force search engines to delete privacy-invasive material from search indexes if the companies do not take action voluntarily, a committee of MPs has said.”
OUT-LAW.com, 27th March 2012
Source: www.out-law.com
“High court privacy injunctions have been given a clean bill of health by a special committee of MPs and peers which were set up in the fallout of the Ryan Giggs gagging order.”
The Guardian, 23rd March 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
“In a unanimous decision ([2012] UKSC 11) the Supreme Court allowed the appeal of Times Newspapers Limited against a decision of the Court of Appeal ([2010] EWCA Civ 804) which had held that it could not rely on Reynolds qualified privilege. The Supreme Court restored the decision of Mr Justice Tugendhat ([2009] EWHC 2375 (QB)) who had ruled, on the hearing of a preliminary issue, that the Times was entitled to rely on the defence of Reynolds qualified privilege in relation to the printed publication of the article about the claimant.”
UK Human Rights Blog, 22nd March 2012
Source: www.ukhumanrightsblog.com
Flood v Times Newspapers Ltd [2012] UKSC 11; [2012] WLR (D) 93
“A publisher was protected from liability for defamation when it published an article containing allegations of corruption against a named police officer, even though the allegations were subsequently held to be unfounded, if it could be shown that the issues raised in the article were matters of public interest and that at the time of publication it appeared to the publishers that there was a strong circumstantial case for believing the allegations to be true.”
WLR Daily, 21st March 2012
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
“Two Occupy protesters who were arrested and charged when they attempted to set up camp in Cardiff are claiming victory after a case against them was unexpectedly dropped.”
The Guardian, 20th March 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
“Publicity from the phone-hacking inquiry doesn’t necessarily prejudice the cases of those arrested in the scandal.”
The Guardian, 18th March 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
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