Wandsworth Guardian reporter overturns gagging order in court

An award-winning journalist has succeeded in lifting a gagging order, which prevented the naming of a 20-year-old sexual offender.

Four women had had their breasts groped by Wajahat Zubair, from Walworth, London, who targeted women walking to or from Tooting Bec underground station. One of his victims, an Australian woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was attacked five times.

Local paper, the Wandsworth Guardian, had not been able to report the case to date as the judge had placed a section 4 order banning the disclosure of the identity of the offender.

Section 4 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 bans reporting which would seriously prejudice court proceedings.

But, following an appeal from Wandsworth Guardian reporter Eleanor Harding, the judge at the hearing in Kingston Crown Court, Judge Matthews, agreed the order was imposed incorrectly in this instance and lifted the restriction on Monday.

It was found that there was no risk of prejudice in Zubair’s case and as such the gagging order had been wrongly placed, the court concluded.

The clerks’ office said the order had been introduced ‘because it is a sex case’, the Guardian reported.

The incidents occurred between March and May last year. Zubair, who had come to the UK to join his mother less than two years ago, was arrested in June last year.

On May 11 this year, after a lengthy trial, he pleaded guilty to eight sexual assaults. He will be sentenced at Kingston Crown Court on August 10.

Speaking about the case in a statement, reporter Harding said:

“The [section 4] order does not exist to protect sex offenders. We are glad it has now been overturned, as cases such as these are clearly in the public interest.

“This is a small victory over the growing culture of over-cautiousness at some courts, which contradicts the principle of open justice.”

Harding is winner of the Mind Journalist of the Year 2009, an award which rewards excellence in mental health reporting.

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Reporting restrictions: who can access them?

As reported on the main site, and as I commented previously on this blog, reporting restrictions which – if broken – would contravene the British Contempt of Court Act, seem increasingly irrelevant.

My own experiences in trying to access the reporting restrictions are perhaps a case in point. Since posting the earlier blog item on the Baby P case, we have had comments posted to this blog which we immediately suspected would contravene the reporting restrictions.

I decided to ring the Old Bailey to find out what they were. Firstly, being put through to the press room by error led to a bizarre encounter with someone (a maverick journalist?) who, extremely rudely, told me ‘you don’t pay’ so ‘why should I send you them to you’, suggesting that I put £50 in an envelope to access them.

His identity remains a mystery (he told me he had forgotten his name before hanging up). I then called the correct department who asked me to send my request by fax. After another couple of stages in which I had to confirm my status as a journalist, I finally accessed the material.

Now I know, for certain, that many of the blog comments we deleted could have seen us prosecuted under the Contempt of Court Act 1981, had we published them. The restrictions themselves forbid me to go into anymore detail than that.

The point here is that bloggers who write about Baby P have no way of accessing the reporting restrictions and therefore no way of knowing whether comments are libellous in breach of the Contempt of Court Act, or not.

When I asked the executive director of the Society of Editors, Bob Satchwell, about educating the general public about Contempt of Court he did not consider it a priority, suggesting that any policing of the internet was something of a lost cause.

But, nevertheless, before (that’s if they do) reforms come in, we have a tricky predicament. Surely, as an intermediary measure there’s a need for anonymised reporting restrictions which would explain to bloggers, social network users and citizen journalists why they can’t print certain details.

After all, journalists – on the whole – understand the need for protection of fair trials. Isn’t it time to explain things better to untrained online publishers?

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Naming Baby P is not about giving into a Facebook campaign

Naming Baby P and his mother is not about giving into a hysterical Facebook campaign group; this is about confronting the reality of the online age.

I can’t link to it here, because it would be breaching reporting restrictions, but I know Baby P’s name, the baby’s mother’s name and the name of her partner.

So does anyone with even a little bit of Google cache savvy about them: it’s on a BBC report from 2007. Google cache preserves a page even if, as the BBC has done, original articles have been removed.

As the Independent reported, Facebook groups have published the details, despite the court order not to.

My argument is not about revealing the names for justice, it is about having a law which can actually be enforced.

If it had been reported abroad, on non-UK websites, they would be not be held accountable under the UK Contempt of Court legislation. Court orders, such as the one in this case protecting the names of the defendants, are simply not feasible in the web age.

I believe that whatever ensures fair trials without prejudice, protects the innocent people involved in the case (other people connected or in the family, for example) is necessary, and if keeping the names secret does that, then that should be done: I certainly won’t be joining any Facebook group to force their disclosure.

But it should be done in such a way where they really are secret, which has not happened in this case:

Jason Owen’s name is known; the mother’s name has also been previously published and is reachable with a quick search; the baby’s photograph is in the press.

One of the Facebook groups has a description reading: ‘For sum [sic] reason the press have seen it fit not to reveal the sick people who killed this poor helpless child.’

The press has not chosen to keep quiet (they certainly would print the names if they could); they are bound by law not to. But what happens when the wider community who have not been taught about reporting restrictions and contempt of court choose to publish, using blogs and social network sites?

I imagine that most people in that community, and wider geography, knows who the family are. Last night’s BBC Panorama showed that the research team were able to access things the mother wrote on social networking sites.

Yet the names cannot be disclosed by the British press without contravening the Contempt of Court Act. This means that disclosures are made through people who aren’t necessarily so concerned about, or even think about, media ethics or face any kind of editorial process.

As I reported in September, Bob Satchwell from the Society of Editors believes the legislation is out of date and redundant, as do many others.

Orders, such as those under section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, for example, allow a court to ban publication of specific information, in addition to statutory reporting restrictions. But how on earth to enforce this in an online world?

This is starkly proven in the case of Baby P.

It’s time to readdress our laws, as Satchwell has urged the Attorney General, and make trials really fair.

Postscript: I’ve just found Martin Belam’s blog post, which makes a similar point, and also focuses on the ’sheer scale of useage of the internet’ in the UK as compared to 2000 when Victoria Climbié case was reported, for example.

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