Super Injunctions

Super Injunctions: the rich, famous, and powerful getting extra protection from scrutiny. The rich and the powerful have their privacy protected in the courts - even when their actions should be transparent - regular people have their privacy sold...

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"Injunctions have become one of the most effective tools powerful individuals and corporations reach for when they want to silence the media."

""Super-injunctions" that prevent news organisations from revealing the identities of those involved in legal disputes, or even reporting the fact that reporting restrictions have been imposed, have emerged recently."

- The Guardian - How super-injunctions are used to gag investigative reporting

"...he absurdity of the imposition of a legal gag on the publication of a Parliamentary question."

"Under the terms of that injunction, the paper could not report the question, the name of the MP who was asking it, the name of the minister to which it was addressed, or where the question might be found.

Worse even, the injunction also forbade the paper — in double jeopardy style — from explaining to its readers why it was prevented from telling them why it could not report the question it could not publish."

- London Evening Standard - Rise of ‘super injunction’ is serious threat to free speech

"MPs have condemned the “super-injunction” which was used by oil company Trafigura to stop journalists reporting a question tabled in the House of Commons."

"The injunction had by that time been rendered ridiculous by users of the social networking site Twitter, and by other websites, which pointed out that the question tabled by Paul FarrellyMP regarded an injunction brought by Trafigura last month banning The Guardian and others from publishing the contents of the Minton report about the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast."

- Press Gazette - MPs slam 'super injunction' which gagged Guardian

"Last week, a judge decided to make John Terry’s problems public knowledge. Though they were widely rumored, an injunction was granted the week before to keep them out of the media. How was this injunction granted and why was it removed?"

- goal.com - Media Microscope: Why John Terry’s Private Problem is Now Public

"If it had not been for Mr Justice Tugendhat, you would not have been able to read in this newspaper or any other the story of the English football captain's misdeeds with a colleague's partner, let alone the ensuing furore over his right to stay on in the post"

- The Independent - Leading article: An issue of power, not privacy

"Celebrities, sports stars and the super-rich will have to take a more rigorous approach when using the courts to safeguard their privacy after a High Court judge allowed the publication of allegations about England's football captain."

"However, Mr -Justice Tugendhat lifted the injunction on Friday after spending a week examining the case in which he came to the conclusion that the gagging order was largely to protect commercial deals and not justified by "the level of gravity of the interference with the private life of the applicant".

- Financial Times - Lifting of Terry super-injunction sets tougher standard for privacy

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Super Injunctions: "In England and Wales a new form of injunction known as a "super-injunction" is a form of gagging order in which the press is prohibited from reporting even the existence of the injunction, or any details of it.[1][2] An example was the super-injunction raised in September 2009 by Carter-Ruck solicitors on behalf of oil trader Trafigura, prohibiting the reporting of an internal Trafigura report into the 2006 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump scandal."

- Wikipedia - Gag order