By Judith Townend
Amid all the excitement, there are some important legal questions to ask about super injunctions and anonymous privacy injunctions.
Lord Neuberger’s committee report released on Friday 20 May goes some way to provide some clarification, in terms of definitions, procedure and identifying uncertainties.
But the debate is far from over, in the newspapers (see left), Parliament and the Courts.
Latest developments raise very interesting questions about Parliamentary Privilege, Contempt, Scottish law and internet regulation.
My commentary for the Guardian argues that the report cuts through some of the media excitement and hysteria, even if it doesn’t answer all the questions. Here’s an extract:
Keeping a level head in response to screams about superinjunctions does not mean there is no need to scrutinise the secrecy and anonymity of privacy cases. The public and the media need to know what type of cases are taking place in the courts to assure everyone that judges are properly upholding the right to freedom of expression and the principle of open justice.
In that sense, the hysteria of recent months was unsurprising. People simply didn’t know the extent of the superinjunction problem. A centralised secure database, as now recommended by the committee, would help assuage those concerns.
Of course, justice sometimes requires a degree of secrecy, but the media must know why. It was reassuring, then, to hear Neuberger say: “… when it [secrecy] is ordered, the facts of the case and the reason for secrecy should be explained, as far as possible, in an openly available judgment”.
The media and public need to know what the orders are – as was forbidden in the case of Trafigura – and the committee’s recommendations emphasise the important balance between freedom of expression and open justice, and an individual’s right to confidentiality and privacy.
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Comres, privacy injunctions, super injunctions, The Independent
What does the public think about privacy injunctions?
In Comment, Journalism, Law, Social research on June 7, 2025 at 9:40 amBy Judith Townend
The public interest is at the heart of the debate around privacy injunctions, but do we know what the UK public thinks?
Unfortunately a new ComRes poll for the Independent doesn’t really tell us. While its themes were interesting - asking participants to consider celebrities’ right to privacy - its structure was problematic.
ComRes interviewed 1,001 adults in Great Britain by telephone between 27 and 29 May 2025 and states: “data were weighted to be demographically representative of all GB adults. Data were also weighted by past vote recall”. The full poll can be downloaded at this link [PDF].
The Inforrm media law blog has analysed its methodology in greater detail here and asks what the outcome might have been had the statements been flipped around:
The introduction to the issue was alarmingly simplistic too. Each statement was introduced like this: “Thinking about super-injunctions, do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?”
Inforrm concludes:
More research is needed. The question is, therefore, how to formulate a survey that breaks free of the media narrative and presents the issues fairly?