On Friday, the High Court in Northern Ireland deflected a serious threat to the right to free speech, not only in the province but also in the country as a whole. It was, however, a very close-run thing, and the affair is still highly worrying.
A Northern Ireland Assembly law that came into effect last year, the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022, made it an imprisonable crime to publish the fact that someone had come under police investigation for a sexual offence unless and until they were charged. If they were never charged the matter had to be hushed up until 25 years after their death (or even longer, if a court agreed to their relatives’ request). As I pointed out at the end of last year, this law was incredibly wide-ranging. Not only did it severely limit what could be said about the dead, it also affected investigations that had taken place at any time. Thus it rendered it illegal at a stroke to state, for example, the historic fact that Jimmy Savile had been reported to the PSNI in 2013 for pederasty but never charged.
The Act in question applies to anything readable in the province. This matters
Mr Justice Humphreys in Belfast has now invalidated these suspect anonymity provisions as infringing the ECHR protection for free speech. They........