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A gag too far

Carter-Ruck, the aggressive media law firm helping the Trafigura oil-trading company in relation to reports of its 2006 waste dumping disaster in Côte d’Ivoire, scored a spectacular own goal yesterday when it tried to keep the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question due to be asked today.

The Guardian asked for an urgent hearing to overturn the gag, which goes against free-speech privileges enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1688 as well as long-established legal precedent; Carter-Ruck withdrew before the matter came to court. It was the work of a few tedious minutes to skim through the Commons Order Book online and find the relevant question. In no time the news had been spread by flocks of twitterati.

The question refers to a previously secret High Court injunction banning the Guardian from mentioning the Minton report, commissioned by Trafigura in September 2006, which related to toxicity levels of the caustic tank washings dumped that August on the coast around Abidjan. Whatever the consultants said, Trafigura continued for three years to claim that they were harmless.

The company finally announced a weak compensation deal for some of the victims — with no admission of liability — on 17 September, the day after the Guardian published internal emails between Trafigura executives considering how to dispose of the toxic “crap” in order to profit from a cheap consignment of petrol from Mexico. The Minton report itself is available on the internet from the anti-corruption group Wikileaks.

Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have mounted a desperate campaign to stop the media from reporting on the illegal dumping, which is said to have caused vomiting, choking and skin eruptions in some 100,000 people and killed at least 12 Ivorians. As well as the injunction against the Guardian, the firm issued a libel writ against BBC2’s Newsnight, which also reported on the dumping, and threatened journalists from Norway, the Netherlands, Estonia and The Times. The Dutch Greenpeace campaigner Marietta Harjono has said she was told not to mention Trafigura on a British radio interview for fear of libel claims.

Carter-Ruck (known to readers of Private Eye by a slightly different name) specialises in protecting clients from “adverse or intrusive” media coverage, and boasts involvement in more than half the libel and privacy claims issued in the High Court in any given year. It offers a 24-hour “media alert” service, threatening media outlets in order to change or block unwanted stories before publication, and often works alongside PR agencies on behalf of clients facing “sustained and hostile media interest.” Obviously, the firm has found that its approach works — or why would it be so clumsy as to block a campaigning newspaper from reporting on Parliament?

Maria Margaronis is London correspondent for The Nation.

Carter-Ruck: courts mugged by new web reality

This post was originally published at Reuters Great Debate

Solicitors Carter-Ruck have backed down on the terms of an injunction they had been granted by the High Court preventing the Guardian newspaper from reporting a parliamentary question by Newcastle-under-Lyme MP and former journalist Paul Farrelly.

This has been seen — rightly — as a victory for free expression, and a demonstration of the amazing power of the web in the face of attempted censorship. Once the Guardian had published its slightly cryptic story on its website last night, containing such tantalising phrases as: “Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret”, it was inevitable that people would go searching. Within hours, the Internet was alive with speculation, links to leaked documents, and republication of cached articles. At one point on Tuesday morning, phrases relating to the case constituted four of Twitter’s top ten “trending topics” — a scarcely believable profile for a story that, technically, no one was supposed to be talking about.

Carter-Ruck seem not to have noticed the mindset of an increasing number of web users: once we are told we can’t know something, modern web users will set about finding out about it with a gleeful determination — and more often than not with neither the cautiousness nor the proprietary attitude to information that can slow down “traditional” reporting.

The Streisand Effect — whereby attempts to censor information end up ensuring the information is only spread more widely, is something that lawyers and judges are going to have to figure out. The strong libertarian culture of the Internet quite simply means that you cannot get away with telling people what to do, and what to read, while surfing. Today’s Twitter triumph is more a victory for the culture of online social networking than it is for the technology.

And an important victory it is. What was at stake here was not merely a newspaper’s right to tell a story, but the very principal of open democracy: if newspapers and other media cannot report everyday parliamentary proceedings without fear of the courts, it is not just the journalism industry that suffers: it is the common citizen’s ability to participate in, and scrutinise, politics.

Update: Read the letter Index on Censorship sent to the courts in support of the Guardian here

Carter-Ruck backs down on Guardian parliamentary reporting

Index on Censorship has learned that law firm Carter-Ruck has backed down in an attempt to stop media from reporting on a parliamentary question concerning a previous injunction. The gag had caused outrage on the Internet, with many Twitter users defying the injunction to post information on the case.

Update: Read the letter Index on Censorship sent to the courts in support of the Guardian here