The increasing power of the internet has not diminished the importance of the contempt of court laws, the Attorney General said last week.
Delivering the Criminal Bar Association’s annual Kalisher Lecture, Dominic Grieve QC dismissed calls to scrap the laws that prohibit the publication of evidence about defendants that could prejudice their trials.
Grieve said that breaches of the laws were not widespread. However, he pointed to examples where problems had arisen with information being made publicly available on the internet, such as the Baby P case, in which the names of the defendants became widely known, despite a court order restricting publication.
Grieve stressed that the established media had not breached the terms of the order, but said that the case had drawn so much public disgust that the defendants’ names were circulated on websites and by text message.
‘Some feel our present legislation is out of date with the 24-hour news culture in which material can be published and accessed by the world at large with the click of a mouse,’ said Grieve.
But he added that the internet did not reduce the importance of contempt laws, or remove the need for fair, accurate contemporaneous reports.
He said: ‘A defendant must be tried solely on the evidence that is presented in court, nothing else. This is the fundamental reason why the contempt of court jurisdiction exists, and why legislation is, in conjunction with other safeguards, as relevant today as ever.’
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