royal courts of justice | Westminster Confidential

My radio interview which is now on the BackTo60 site

One of the most disturbing things coming back to the UK after nearly three months is how the country is now gripped in an inevitable lock down without any sign of an exit – as this nasty virus – Covid-19 – takes a grip on the nation.

For women and men in their 60s the situation is particularly dire. They should be protected but are not. Instead they have the problems of either being pushed out of work and put at the mercy of the hopeless and half finished Universal Credit system or the government’s long delayed payments for the self employed for any money.

They know they are a high risk group recognised by the World Health Organisation ( WHO) but they are caught between surviving on savings or going out to work – including for the NHS and in care homes – knowing they stand a greater chance of getting the virus. The two scenarios I illustrated in my article for Byline Times.

But probably the most pleasing thing that happened while I was away was the decision of the Court of Appeal to grant an appeal from the two 50swomen on behalf of BackTo60 on all grounds after the disappointing judicial review decision. which rejected their case.

The women I know have a long wait until July for the hearing but if they hadn’t taken this step they would be nowhere under this present Tory government.

The applicants at the time would not have known how damaging the coronavirus would be but fortunately they got their right to appeal before the courts closed down to hear most new cases. The latest situation at the Court of Appeal can be seen in their latest briefing( April 17).

The fact that BackTo60 has got an appeal on all grounds is significant given the judicial review rejected their case on all grounds and the judge who decided this also wanted to stop an appeal.

Lawyers for the claimants were confident that they could win permission to appeal – and they were right.

At the time detractors – many of whom should have known better – were making wild claims about the crowd funding appeal – which was set at a specific figure on the advice of the lawyers- and trying to stir up animosity against BackTo60. They did not succeed and the result is the issue remains very much alive.

The other key result is that for the government the issue will have to be faced again – ministers have not succeeded in squashing the campaign in the courts. The government knows it will have to argue its case again and 3.8 million women will have a voice at the Royal Courts of Justice to say why they were mistreated and swindled out of their pensions.

I have given a radio interview which is also on BackTo60 and you can listen to it at the top of this blog.

50s women dancing in front of the Royal Court of Justice after the judge granted their request for a judicial review the first time

Pic Credit: http://www.defamationlawblog.com

CROSS POSTED ON BYLINE.COM

Some fascinating new official figures showing a startling decline in the number of new libel cases have been revealed on the excellent media law blog Inforrm.

They show a 40 per cent drop in the number of new libel claims in the Royal Courts of Justice between 2014 and 2015 from 227 to 135. Admittedly 2014 had a large number of new cases but the blog points out that there has been a steady decline in libel actions since 1992. You can read the blog and see the statistics in full here.

The introduction of the new Defamation Act is the biggest change to libel in the last two years which aimed to reduce the number of claims by establishing ways of settling issues without coming to a full trial in court.

The jury is still out on how effective this new legislation is. But it appears that the huge cost of mounting a libel trial and a cap on damages that will be awarded to the person defamed has had a chilling effect.

As the blog said: ” Even with costs budgeting, both parties’ cost of a libel case taken to full trial are likely to be of the order of £700,000 (for example, Stocker £682,000; Yeo, £716,000).

Damages are effectively capped at £275,000 for the most serious possible libel (see Barron v Vines [2016] EWHC 1226 (QB)) but, in practice, even after a contested trial awards rarely exceed £100,000.

It has also been suggested that the Reynolds qualified privilege defence (now “Publication on Matter of Public Interest” under section 4 of the Defamation Act 2013) has, by encouraging journalistic responsibility, reduced the number of egregious libels and so the number of actions.”

Frankly this is all good news for bloggers who are threatened with libel cases from big and powerful commercial interests and powerful figures. Are they going to spend up to £700,000 with all the attendant publicity of a trial to take on a blog when the most they could get back might be less than £100,000? And they would have no chance of recovering their money either.

What this doesn’t disclose is whether the rich and powerful are using other means to silence critics particularly bloggers. This big drop in cases has been accompanied by a big rise in the number of people using the ” right to be forgotten ” imposed by the European Court to get Google to remove serious criticism of individuals from its search engine on the net.

This is a far cheaper and effective way of silencing critics. As Inforrm reported earlier :

” Large numbers of delisting requests are now being made under the Google Spain ruling. Google’s most recent transparency report indicates that it has received 400,564 removal requests and has removed 42.6% of URLs covered by them. Google has received 48,979 requests from the United Kingdom and has removed 184,115 URLs (38.6% of those requested).”.

Given the internet is peppered with defamatory statements about people could this be a new and more secretive way of silencing criticism? It avoids the publicity of a libel trial and there appears to be no appeal and no easy way of knowing this has happened.

Could this be the new way -arguing privacy – the rich and powerful stop legitimate criticism and damning disclosures about their past?