No Matter How Large or Powerful, Court Orders Must Be Obeyed!

23/06/2017


Even the largest and most powerful organisations have to toe the line when faced with court orders. In one case, the High Court took a dim view of a newspaper publisher’s astonishing failure to abide by a formal undertaking that it would not identify animal charities named as beneficiaries in the will of infamous murderer Ian Brady.

The Court had refused an emergency telephone application by the will’s executor to restrain a national newspaper from publishing details of requests that it contained in relation to Brady’s funeral arrangements. However, the Court expressed concern that the charities would suffer loss if it became known to the public that they were intended beneficiaries of any profits generated by publication of a book that Brady had written. In the circumstances, the publisher had undertaken that the charities would not be named, either online or in print.

However, later on the day of the telephone call, the charities had been identified both in the newspaper’s first edition and on its website. The breaches of the undertaking had arisen due to a series of communication lapses and the charities’ names were swiftly removed from the newspaper’s website and from its second edition after the Court itself alerted the publisher to the errors.

The publisher had made sincere apologies and the Court accepted that the breaches were not deliberate. However, it was far from impressed by the publisher’s conduct and, in a public judgment, described the litany of errors that had led to the breaches as frankly astonishing. It was, however, clear that the publisher had taken the matter very seriously and had taken steps to ensure that there would be no repetition. In the circumstances, the Court was persuaded by a narrow margin to take no further action.

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