Privacy injunction hearings: not ‘super’ but anonymous

By Judith Townend

This week I helped the Inforrm blog put together a list of privacy injunction hearings, to contribute to the debate about super and anonymous injunctions. Versions of the post have appeared on the BBC College of Journalism and the Italian-English Media Laws site. Or see below…

Limited information is available about privacy injunction hearings in British courts but sometimes the press cries ‘super injunction’ when it’s simply not.

A super injunction is where its very existence cannot be reported – as in the cases involving Trafigura (2009) and Terry (2010). As media lawyer Mark Thomson explained in a footnote on the Inforrm media law blog last year: “The ‘super injunction’ part of the order is the restraint on publication of the existence of the proceeding.”

So the recent case of ZAM v CFW, despite media reports to the contrary, did not involve a super injunction – as freelance lawyer and former Guardian readers’ editor Siobhain Butterworth confirms in an article here.

Instead, it was an order in which the names were anonymised – hence the mysterious ZAM and CFW – but the media could report that the injunction existed and the judgment was publicly available online.