Ryan Giggs unmasked as gagging order footballer
The law on privacy injunctions was thrown into further confusion after MP John Hemming defied a High Court judge to unmask Ryan Giggs as the footballer at the centre of a gagging order storm.
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Ryan Giggs was named today just hours after the High Court had refused to allow journalist to name the Manchester United player
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Ryan Giggs with wife Stacey Giggs Photo: PA
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With his children after Manchester United won the Premier League Photo: AFP
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Imogen Thomas arriving at the High Court in London Photo: PA
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John Hemming MP on BBc parliament where he named Ryan Giggs
By Gordon Rayner, and Steven Swinford 10:12PM BST 23 May 2011
John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat, used parliamentary privilege to disclose that Ryan Giggs had obtained an injunction to prevent details of an alleged adulterous affair being published.
Mr Hemming took matters into his own hands after 75,000 Twitter users and a Scottish newspaper named the Manchester United star as the player who had allegedly conducted a relationship with Imogen Thomas, a former reality television star. His intervention rode roughshod over a gagging order that was upheld in two hearings yesterday, as two judges insisted that Giggs should remain anonymous.
David Cameron had earlier put Parliament on a collision course with the judiciary by claiming that the current law on privacy orders was “unsustainable” since the whole country knew the identity of the player. The Prime Minister announced that he was setting up a committee urgently to consider how to address the issue, but he immediately came under pressure to act more swiftly and issue new instructions to the judiciary.
On a day of drama in the High Court and the Commons, a senior judge rejected the suggestion that he was “King Canute” as he tried to hold back a deluge of internet postings naming Giggs.
But Mr Hemming’s address to Parliament appeared to be a watershed moment in the growing rift between MPs and judges. He also named Giles Coren, a restaurant critic, as the journalist facing potential legal action after using Twitter to identify another footballer with a privacy order.
Mr Cameron had signalled an intention to grasp the nettle when he told ITV1’s Daybreak programme that “like everybody else” he knew the identity of the then unnamed footballer who had an alleged affair with Miss Thomas, a former Big Brother contestant.
He said: “It is rather unsustainable, this situation, where newspapers can’t print something that clearly everybody else is talking about, but there’s a difficulty here because the law is the law and the judges must interpret what the law is. What I’ve said in the past is, the danger is that judgments are effectively writing a new law which is what Parliament is meant to do.
“So I think the Government, Parliament, has got to take some time out, have a proper look at this, have a think about what we can do, but I’m not sure there is going to be a simple answer.” He added: “It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t, so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today.”
During the course of the day, Mr Justice Eady turned down a fresh attempt, by the publishers of The Sun, to lift the ban on naming Giggs, arguing in the High Court that “the dam has not burst” and the courts could still afford him some protection.
Then, in a second application by the publishers, after Giggs had been named in Parliament, another judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, again kept the gagging order in place.
He said: “The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the internet confirms that the claimant and his family need protection from the intrusion into their private and family life the more you taunt someone, the more distressing it is.
“If (the order) can stop five people, if not 50,000, then that is to be achieved.”
The same judge defended privacy injunctions as he published his decisions for granting injunctions relating to Sir Fred Goodwin, the former RBS boss, and a second Premier League footballer.
Giggs, a 37-year-old father of two, took out his injunction a month ago to prevent newspapers disclosing an alleged lengthy affair with Miss Thomas, about which he had not told his wife, Stacey. John Whittingdale, the chairman of the Commons culture committee, had asked the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, to address privacy injunctions, claiming that the law was being made to look “an ass”. Mr Grieve announced that a new committee of MPs and peers would investigate the use of gagging orders, saying: “A range of wider issues has been raised by the events of the past few months and especially the past weekend.
“We take seriously the need to ensure that we have the correct balance between privacy and freedom of expression.” Moments later Mr Hemming drew gasps in the Commons as he named Giggs, with one MP shouting out “disgrace”.
Mr Hemming later explained that he had decided to name the player to prevent people being jailed for gossiping about him, after Giggs last week tried to force Twitter to reveal the names of people who had broken the injunction.
He said: “When he sued Twitter and showed he was going to go after relatively ordinary people and try to prosecute them for gossiping about him on a matter of trivia, I think he has to be held to account for that.”
Later, he called on Mr Cameron to act straight away, saying: “They need to make it clear that people won’t be prosecuted for gossip on the internet, it shouldn’t be a criminal offence to embarrass a footballer.
“The Government needs to make its position on this clear.” Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem peer said: “Before judges sound off about parliamentarians flouting injunctions, they should consider very carefully how a single judge sitting at short notice can take the public interest properly into account. It’s very dangerous to challenge parliamentary privilege.”
Lord Oakeshott previously revealed that Sir Fred Goodwin’s super-injunction related to an alleged affair with a senior colleague,
However Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, urged caution.
He said: “He [David Cameron] needs to be saying that politicians should respect the rule of law whilst we wait for the committee to report.
“Politicians have the power in practice to wreck the law, and the reason we have judges deciding who is entitled to privacy is because they look at the facts and are not motivated by who is popular and who is not.”
Telegraph.feedsportal.com
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