Monday 12 October 2009

What the Carter-Ruck? Guardian in Parly gag

The Guardian reports tonight that the paper has been prevented from reporting Parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds in what it says appears to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
The paper says today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week but The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting Parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck.
The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting. Editor Alan Rusbridger, said: "The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque world in which we cannot tell the public anything about information which is being suppressed, nor the proceedings which suppress it. It is doubly menacing when those restraints include the reporting of parliament itself."
Tonight Twitter quickly showed how irrelevant these gagging orders are in the age of the internet.
Pic: Jon Slattery

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