CONTEMPT OF COURT

Committal order - injunction preventing publication of information likely to lead to identification and whereabouts of specified individuals - injunction terms not ambiguousAttorney-General v Greater Manchester Newspapers Ltd: QBD (Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, President): 4 December 2001The Attorney-General applied to commit the defendant newspaper for contempt for breach of a court order of 8 January 2001, whereby contra mundum injunctions had been granted to protect the lives and physical safety of the claimants, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, following their release from detention, by publishing information which was likely to lead to the identification of their then present whereabouts.The defendants, while apologising for publishing the information, contended that they were not in contempt since the wording of the injunction 'likely to lead to identification' was ambiguous and imprecise and that, as the information was contained in statistical government publications available in libraries and on a Web site, it was already in the public domain.Andrew Caldecott QC and Stephen Suttle (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) for the Attorney-General.

Desmond Browne QC and Jacob Dean (instructed by Cobbetts, Manchester) for the defendant newspaper.

Held, granting the application, that there was no ambiguity in the words 'likely to lead to' which were not to be equated with statistical probability in the context in which they had been used but to the real chance that the claimants' lives would be at serious risk; that the information published, coupled with local knowledge, was sufficient to pinpoint the whereabouts of one of the claimants; that, although the information was also to be found in specialised government publications it was not realistically available to the general public and was therefore not in the public domain; so that the defendants were guilty of contempt.