Trafigura’s Compensation Must Reach the Victims
Oil traders Trafigura have gone to a great deal of effort to make the story about toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast go away – from using law firm Carter-Ruck to initiate libel proceedings against the Guardian and BBC, to attempting to stop questions about it being raised in the House of Commons. They’ve even paid $45 million to Ivory Coast in compensation to 30,000 victims (which was on top of $200 paid to the government for the clean-up operation), but even that is far from the end of the story:
A court in the Ivory Coast has ruled that compensation due to thousands of victims of dumped waste should not be paid to one man to distribute.
Oil trading company Trafigura had agreed to pay $45m (£27m) to 30,000 victims in an out-of-court settlement.
Claude Ghourou argued he should be given responsibility for the money, but there were doubts he would pass it on.
However, despite the ruling the money remains blocked and victims cannot yet gain access to their compensation.
Before the ruling Amnesty International intervened, urging:
the authorities in Côte d’Ivoire to ensure that £27 million compensation paid by the oil trading company Trafigura to victims of one of the worst toxic dumping scandals in recent years reaches the people to whom it is owed.
Amnesty has also written to the UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw, urgently asking him to contact his counterpart in the Côte d’Ivoire to press for swift action to prevent a potentially massive fraud being perpetrated. The call came as thousands of the victims of the illegal dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan, capital of Côte d’Ivoire, wait anxiously to receive their money.
The Post-Carter-Ruck Alliance
Yes I know I took my own pictures of the Carter-Ruck flashmob last week, but this one has me in it. I’m in print! In the Guardian! Yay! Peter Preston also has some interesting points about the new alliances forged as a result of the second Carter-Ruck injunction on the Guardian:
as the Guardian‘s triumphant Alan Rusbridger noted, is that it wasn’t a win for press battalions or nippy legions of Twitterers alone. You needed the resources of a determined paper – and, in parallel, a dogged BBC – to pursue the toxic case of Africans falling violently ill in the Ivory Coast. And you needed an elliptical front page story in print about a gagged Commons question to set the blogosphere buzzing.
It’s a cute, quick conclusion, but he should bear in mind that there was no deliberate alliance, and after Carter-Ruck clearly got nervy about their misjudgment with it and varied the second injunction, it rapidly fell apart. Between Tuesday and Friday night’s reversal of the first super injunction, the blogosphere and Twitter in general had completely lost interest in Trafigura and Carter-Ruck. The issue for Twitter was the question of freedom of speech in parliament, nothing more – when that was restored it was job done, everyone then piled on Jan Moir for her homophobic bile, even though the Guardian was still operating under severe restrictions. The BBC also didn’t act uniformally with the Guardian and blogosphere – Newsnight and the Guardian may both have exposed Trafigura’s role in the toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast, and both were facing legal action by Carter-Ruck as a result, but the BBC was almost entirely silent when the Guardian went on the offensive.
Don’t get me wrong I think some very interesting changes have happened as a result of Carter-Ruck’s historic misjudgment with the second super injunction, but the relationship between old and new media is unstable and the outcomes frequently overstated. The fight against hack Jan Moir’s homophobic attack on Stephen Gately may have generated an historic number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), but the Daily HateMail’s editor Paul Dacre remains chairman of the PCC’s Editors’ Code of Practice – the very code his employee (and he by extension) broke. As long as that’s the case all the tweets in the world won’t really change anything, and indeed although Trafigura and Carter-Ruck are rapidly backtracking from their hardline behaviour, libel law is unchanged in the UK, other super injunctions remain in place and noone is holding Trafigura to account.
It Wasn’t Just Ivory Coast…
The impression has no doubt been given that the whole Trafigura/Carter-Ruck affair has centred around the dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. But identical waste was shipped to Norway that year too:
Oil-trader Trafigura is under police investigation in Norway, accused of illegal import of waste. The waste was brought to Norway on the Probo Emu in 2006, and is identical to the waste that Trafigura shipped to the Ivory Coast on the Probo Koala.
The Norwegian police have been investigating Trafigura for more than a year and a half, but so far nobody in the company has been willing to give statement or answer questions from the Norwegian police.
– We are surprised, and have the impression that Trafigura is not interested in assisting in the investigation, says Hans Tore Høviskeland, head of prosecution in Økokrim.
It’s not just allegations of the illegal import of identical waste. Because of a ‘blunder’ by Trafigura’s subcontractor Vest Tank, similar waste from on-shore caustic washing exploded, with severe consequences:
Trafigura, the British oil trading giant which agreed to pay £30m to the victims of one of Africa’s worst pollution disasters, has failed to co-operate with an investigation into an explosion in a Norwegian fjord involving waste from one of its ships, The Independent can reveal.
Hundreds of residents of the Norwegian village of Slovag fell ill in May 2007 when a huge tank holding waste from low-quality oil processed on behalf of Trafigura caught fire and exploded, leading to one of the worst pollution incidents in Norway’s history as a cloud of sulphurous smoke rose over the surrounding area.
A prosecution of three individuals linked to Vest Tank, the Norwegian company which ran the processing operation on Norway’s west coast, is due to begin in November and will hear evidence of how Trafigura sent six shipments totalling 150,000 tonnes of cheap and dirty coker gasoline to Slovag in 2006 and 2007.
The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) report that Trafigura have so far refused to answer why they chose to perform caustic washing in Sløvåg, when it’s illegal in the EU (which Norway is not a member state of). They also have refused to answer why the Probo Emu failed to apply for import permits for the earlier waste, and failed to notify Norwegian environmental authorities of its arrival.
So before you start believing their backtracking from the legal mess they’re responsible for in the UK, with their super injunctions, crude attacks on parliament and the freedom of speech, consider where their responsibility for both disasters lay. The Norwegian authorities claim Vest Tank didn’t even have the correct permits to carry out caustic washing and waste processing, which Vest Tank deny - it’s all remarkably similar to the situation in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where Trafigura have also denied any responsibility for their subcontractor there dumping the identically toxic waste in populated areas. Solomon Ugburogbu’s company Tommy didn’t even have the facilities for treating the toxic waste which ended up dumped instead.
In both instances Trafigura bought extremely cheap, low grade refinery gasoline at a profit, and turned this coker naptha as cheaply as they could through a process called caustic washing, into a petrol which wasn’t even legal to sell in the EU, in order to sell it on to Africa (where it was legal) at a further profit. The toxic waste resulting from the earlier caustic washing at sea ended up dumped in Abidjan; in the case of Sløvåg it appears to have been illegally imported, although caustic washing was done on land there as well. Trafigura knew when they tried to offload the waste which ended up in Abidjan in Amsterdam, how expensive it would be to treat the sludge legally, yet its final destination was Tommy. In Sløvåg the sludge blew up, even though Trafigura knew of the dangers of storing it for more than a few days. Deaths in Abidjan and serious health problems in Norway – Trafigura at the centre of it, making huge profits. Pierre Lorinet, the oil trading firm’s CFO said:
“We decided that our best course of action at the time was to get the [initial, super-] injunction, because we didn’t want more inaccurate reporting on things which are very clearly wrong effectively. It is a heavy-handed approach, absolutely. With hindsight, could it have been done differently? Possibly. The injunction was never intended to gag parliament or attack free speech.”
They never wanted to gag parliament or attack free speech, just wanted to stop ‘inaccurate reporting’? Given the mountain of evidence underpinning said reporting, make your own mind up, and make sure you read the Minton Report. The Basel Convention bans the export of toxic waste to developing countries – it’s no wonder Trafigura have stopped at nothing to suppress even a mention of it.
Carter-Ruck Attempt to Censor Parliament?
Following the failure of Carter-Ruck’s second ‘super injunction’ against the Guardian, which attempted to prevent them from reporting Paul Farrelly MP’s question in the House of Commons about the Minton Report, which contradicts their client Trafigura’s claims about the toxic waste dumping in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, they’ve suggested to the Speaker that even debating said super injunction is illegal:
Carter-Ruck partner Adam Tudor today sent a letter to the Speaker, John Bercow, and also circulated it to every single MP and peer, saying they believed the case was “sub judice”.
If correct, it would mean that, under Westminster rules to prevent clashes between parliament and the courts, a debate planned for next Wednesday could not go ahead.
Earlier this week, the Labour MP Paul Farrelly said Carter-Ruck might be in contempt of parliament for seeking to stop the Guardian reporting questions he had put down on the order paper revealing the existence of the “super-injunction”.
This case just gets worse and worse, but neither the speaker nor many MPs appear to agree with Carter-Ruck’s analysis:
Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP who secured next week’s debate, said: “I read with interest the letter from Carter-Ruck. I do not think that sub judice is involved here and I do not think that MPs will be deterred from discussing this case in the debate without a ruling from the Speaker, which he has not as yet indicated any likelihood of providing.”
Farrelly said: “Carter-Ruck’s manoeuvres this week, were it not so serious, would be tantamount to high farce. It is important MPs should not be prevented from going ahead with debates next week.”
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has written to Speaker Bercow, saying:
“I hope you take the view that this matter should, indeed, be debated,” he said. “The fact remains that the issue was unclear enough for an experienced QC [Queen's counsel] to advise us not to publish. There is a lack of clarity around this issue and Wednesday’s debate could serve a useful function in helping to give editors (and lawyers) guidance.”
This is a basic freedom of speech issue. We are in a situation where a national newspaper has discovered that a major multinational corporation has disposed of highly toxic waste in Ivory Coast, causing numerous injuries. Yet rather than respond to the story, Trafigura instead attacks the Guardian and other papers and broadcasters (not just in the UK) with a ‘super injunction’, preventing them from reporting on the Minton Report, which flat out contradicts their account of the story. The super injunction also bizarrely bans the reporting of the injunction itself. Then MP Paul Farrelly decides to bring the Minton Report and the super injunction up in a question in the House of Commons, but Carter-Ruck succeeds in banning reporting of his question with a second super injunction. Now after its fall, Carter-Ruck are trying to inhibit parliamentary debate of the issue.
Money (and lots of it) is subverting the right to free speech and a free press. There’s a terrible story which needs to be told here and a big cheque book shouldn’t be able to prevent it under the guise of ‘defamation’. This can’t go on. Read Jon Wessel-Aas’ fascinating article, detailing his experiences as a lawyer fighting super injuctions in Norway for some ideas on where the next step ought to lie. Is it time for the big media players to start defying this abuse of the law and reasserting the primacy of the press? If so the Tories’ threatened removal of the Human Rights Act would be an even greater catastrophe…
EDIT: Carter-Ruck and Trafigura have withdrawn the first super injunction. And the backtrack gains pace. Perhaps the Guardian and Twitter have achieved something enormous after all.
The Carter-Ruck Flashmob
Yesterday saw a small but determined flashmob form outside the London offices of libel law firm Carter-Ruck. Carter-Ruck remains at the centre of a legal and political furore over the super injunctions understood to have been used by the firm to try to prevent reporting of its client Trafigura’s involvement in this story, as well as to prevent reporting of the Minton Report (which confirms the waste was dangerous). The participants in the flashmob wore gags to reflect their anger at Carter-Ruck’s sifling of free speech for the benefit of their client, who would rather punish those who reported its wrongdoing than take responsibility, apologise and make amends.
Twitter Did Not Win It
Wikileaks, a site at the centre of the fightback against Trifigura and Carter-Ruck’s attempt to prevent the Guardian reporting on Jack Straw’s response to attempts to suppress the Minton Report in parliament, suggests Twitter didn’t end up saving free speech:
This ill-informed back-patting follows the dropping of a secret UK High Court gag order blocking the Guardian’s reporting of parliamentary questions by Paul Farrelly MP. Farrelly’s questions related to press freedoms and in particular, a leaked WikiLeaks report, the so-called “Minton report” which exposed a toxic dumping disaster inflicted on the Ivory Coast by oil trading giant Trafigura, which is reported to have hospitalized over 100,000 people.
However, a more substantive secret gag order against the report, granted in September, entirely prevents the reporting of its contents and remains in effect. It is not the only one. Last month, the Guardian revealed that it had been served with 10 secret gag orders—so-called “super-injunctions”— since January. In 2008, the paper was served with six. In 2007, five. Haven’t heard of these? Of course not, they are secret gag orders. The UK press has given up counting regular injunctions.
To understand the crucial events in this case, we need to go back to September when commodities giant Trafigura obtained the original “super injunction” preventing discussion of the leaked Minton report into the Ivory Coast disaster.
During September and the preceding months, investigative reporters from the Guardian, Norway’s NRK TV, the Independent, the BBC’s Newsnight, the Dutch press, Greenpeace and lawyers for the victims were collaborating to show Trafigura’s culpability.
It’s a blistering editorial, which everyone who cares about the freedom of the press and free speech in general should read as a priority. In essence the Guardian (amongst others) was hit with a gag order preventing reporting on the Minton Report on September 11th. Paul Farrelly MP was then understood to have intended his parliamentary question to draw attention to the order, given that libel laws are not applicable in the Houses of Parliament, so Carter-Ruck went for a second injunction in effect to shut him up too, and against all expectation succeeded. The Guardian made the second gag the national issue and drew the worldwide blogosphere in on its side, but Wikileaks believes the second injunction fell despite the massive Twitter intervention (the subject of earlier posts); with politicians amongst the targets it was inevitable. The lawsuits and gags in place before the attack on Farrelly remain untouched, and politicians are now largely disinterested in the subject. Free speech in the UK remains laughable, when it can be suppressed with a big enough chequebook, even over matters of vital public interest such as Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast.
The Minton Report can be found here.
Guardian Gagging Order Defeated!
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger confirms law firm Carter-Ruck have backed down on their gagging order against the paper:
arusbridger Thanks to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #guardian #trafigura #carterRuck
It’s a monumetal victory for the Twitterverse and free speech. Now join me on Thursday outside Carter-Ruck’s offices:
To protest against the Guardian Gag, ordered by Carter-Ruck, blocking reporting of the goings on of our OWN PARLIAMENT (and for no other reason than the protection of corrupt private enterprise) we are going to GAG THEM
Silent flashmob, come stand silently out side the offices of Carter-Ruck (map below), gagged with a piece of black fabric.
We won’t be breaking the law, they, and the people they represent are.
Nearest Tubes: Chancery Lane, Faringdon.
Well done everyone on Twitter. Together we undid the best efforts of an unscrupulous law firm and their industrial polluter client.
They Don’t Want You To See This
I’ll let Charlie Brooker kick things off:
charltonbrooker Gimme a T! Gimme an R! Gimme an AFIGURA! http://bit.ly/4fDKNR #trafigura
WikiLeaks believes the Guardian was gagged to prevent it reporting the following parliamentary question:
- Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) – To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.[1]
Want to read the Minton Report? Here it is. Its findings?
It’s all about Trafigura’s involvement with toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. I quote:
[But the] dozens of damning internal Trafigura emails which have now come to light reveal how traders were told in advance that their planned chemical operation, a cheap and dirty process called “caustic washing”, generated such dangerous wastes that it was widely outlawed in the west.
The documents reveal that the London-based traders hoped to make profits of $7m a time by buying up what they called “bloody cheap” cargoes of sulphur-contaminated Mexican gasoline. They decided to try to process the fuel on board a tanker anchored offshore, creating toxic waste they called “slops”.
One trader wrote on 10 March 2006: “I don’t know how we dispose of the slops and I don’t imply we would dump them, but for sure, there must be some way to pay someone to take them.” The resulting black, stinking, slurry was eventually dumped around landfills in Abidjan, after Trafigura paid an unqualified local man to take it away in tanker trucks at a cheap rate.
You are encouraged to express your thoughts here about an oil trader known to have committed an act of industrial pollution, using a libel law firm to prohibit reporting from parliament, on a report it doesn’t want you to know about.
UPDATE: Mr Justice Sweeney signed the gagging order.
Mugging the rich bastard lawyers
If the famous media gaggers, the libel law firm Carter-Ruck, scourge of Private Eye, thought they’d scored another famous victory (these guys are big on bragging) suppressing news they hadn’t reckoned with social media.
#trafigura is as I type the #1 trending topic on Twitter (that’s in the whole world). The Spectator has already broken the wall between what the blogs will say and what the print media thinks it can get away with … and many, many more people are now aware of the very story a very rich set of bastards running a polluting company is paying them – presumably – many millions to kill.
In a few hours American bloggers will start picking up on the story enmasse. What’s Carter-Ruck going to do then? As @ElrikMerlin just pointed out to me ‘this is Streisand Effect in action’ – something which I have blogged about before.
When Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov tried the same trick, and created the same effect, it generated this quote from Boris Johnson (one of those inadvertently whacked by Usmanov’s ‘take-down’ action):
We live in a world where internet communication is increasingly vital, and this is a serious erosion of free speech.
This is what Carter-Ruck did:
The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.
This feels like another significant turning point for social media.
My updates throughout today
Nick Clegg has tweeted ‘Very interested concerned about this #trafigura / Guardian story the @LibDems are planning to take action on this’
Carter-Ruck to be Flash Mobbed.
Twitter panics over Trafigura:
Trafigura was deleted from trending topics, despite the fact it was obviously the top-trending topic. One minute it was top, the next it had vanished. Twitter’s trend explanations were also absent from any topics relating to Trafigura.
I don’t blame them, British libel laws are notorious for being swingeing, and Carter-Ruck’s efficacy in the area is well-know.
[#trafigua has now come back up trending topics]
@arusbridger #Guardian editor tweets: hoping to get into court today to challenge ban by #carterruck on reporting parliament. Watch this space
Wikileaks has updated on the report lying behind the attempted Guardian gag.
BBC finally reporting #guardiangag , fourteen hours after Guardian published.
Telegraph peeks out, surveys on #trafigura
Carter-Ruck are on Twitter (nb: could possibly be imposter). The tweets are unreal:
@carterruck is looking for a new slogan. “Defending the indefensible” #carterruckslogan
LibDems have tabled an urgent question.
The huge US liberal website Daily Kos is now onto #trafigura.
We want to put the Streisand Effect to work, and make hashtags #carterruck and especially #trafigura the top trending topics on Twitter. Please include these hashtags in your tweets of the next 24 hours.
First satirical take: Carter-Ruck successfully preserves Trafigura’s online reputation:
“We at Carter-Ruck are proud to be so effective in protecting such deserving clients, and look forward to working just as effectively for the reputations of similarly environmentally well-behaved companies around the globe,” said Carter-Ruck’s new directors of marketing George Monbiot and Julian Assange.
Guardian reports today’s legal action by them.
MP, who Guardian is currently prohibited from identifying, said he would ask the Speaker to consider taking action against Carter-Ruck for contempt of parliament.
The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that “whatever comments are made in parliament” can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.
He said: “Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of ‘Colonel B’, granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of ‘national security’. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published.”
The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the king – over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes’s battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, “it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to”.
Ungag the Guardian twibbon campaign.
Sky News Niall Paterson blogs:
Should there be any restrictions placed on the reporting and analysis of what is said (and written) in the Palace of Westminster? I’d argue not, save perhaps for those rare occasions when national security is truly at risk.
Yet this “sensitive” question appears on the Order Paper and the answer will appear in Hansard.
Gagged? This journalist is gagging at the court’s decision.
Carter-Ruck now under attack on Google Maps
Guardian report on lifting of gag.
journalism.co.uk commentary and background on past Carter-Ruck gagging attempts.
Number Ten petition to the Prime Minister:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to enshrine in law the absolute right of the media to report the proceedings of The House in full at all times.
Plus campaign website on same set up:
Tell your MP to stand up for the media’s right to report on politicians in Westminster: e-mail them in two minutes, now.
BBC: Guardian claims victory on ‘gag’ :
Newsnight will report on this case and the prevalence of media laws being used by large companies to restrict information on Tuesday 13 October 2009 at 10.30pm on BBC Two.
BBC media correspondent Nick Higham for BBC website, When is a secret not a secret?:
In the anarchic, anything-goes world of the internet, where freedom of speech is a frequently heard rallying cry, injunctions banning publication of anything are unpopular. This one seems to have acted like a red rag to a bull.
There is no doubt that the events of the past day have been profoundly democratic, entirely in keeping with the Bill of Rights’ sweeping away of kingly powers and its assertion of the primacy of openness among the governors of the people. In a parallel universe, attempts to muzzle parliament might be seen as treasonable – but while we’ll never have libel lawyers hearing the axe being sharpened in the Tower, the end result – a chilling effect on the silencers – is just as welcome, and welcomingly just.
Tweet from @wikileaks : Remember the UK press is STILL GAGGED from saying the toxic dumping report is on WikiLeaks HERE: http://bit.ly/v5rDJ
James Mackintosh for Financial Times, People power 1, Carter-Ruck and Trafigura 0:
Let’s hope Jack Straw, secretary of state for justice, listens: the trend towards ever-wider gagging orders gives big companies and the rich and powerful yet another way to strangle investigative journalism – as if the overly-restrictive libel and confidentiality laws were not bad enough.
Oil-trading company Trafigura knew that waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006 was hazardous.
Trafigura had persistently denied that the waste was harmful but internal e-mails show staff knew it was hazardous.
…
The chemical waste came from a ship called Probo Koala and in August 2006 truckload after truckload of it was illegally fly-tipped at 15 locations around Abidjan, the biggest city in Ivory Coast.In the weeks that followed the dumping, tens of thousands of people reported a range of similar symptoms, including breathing problems, sickness and diarrhoea.
Mark Pack spots an unfortunate quote being served up on the Carter-Ruck homepage and says I think Carter-Ruck might be changing this quote, don’t you?.
NBC News’ @AnnCurry tweets:
Victims of alledged toxic waste dumping by Trafigura Co. Its legal firm CarterRuck tried to stop this story: http://bit.ly/3jU0vD
Ian Douglas for the Telegraph, Context overcomes the law for Trafigura and the Guardian:
A search in Google News for Trafigura yielded the Guardian’s piece reporting the order, despite the word never being mentioned. So many people had linked to it using the name of the company that there was no need for the Guardian to break the order themselves, as the search engines determine the subject of a page by analysing those that link to it as much as the page itself.
Tweet from @BristleKRS:
Today’s twictionary words: 1: to #CarterRuck up; vb tr, to fail in exponential relationship to invoiced fee
Tory Politico is reporting that The Independent has removed a story, published on September 17, relating to Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The story is still available through the google cache of the page.
Techpresident, The Internet as Toxic Avenger: Trafigura and the Ungagging of the Guardian:
Here you can see how the gagging of the Guardian was rapidly overwhelmed by mentions of Trafigura on Twitter, via Trendistic.
BBC Newsnight [Video], Dirty tricks and toxic waste in Ivory Coast.
Philippe Naughton for the Times, Twitter-power wins gagging victory over Carter-Ruck and Trafigura:
“Wow,” said one Twitterer among the deluge of comments. “Never heard of Trafigura before today.”
Tweet from Guardian Editor @arusbridger : Now support #Newsnight which is being sued by #Trafigura and #carterRuck over toxic waste expose http://tinyurl.com/pqf4dt
[Via PoliticsHome]: In the Commons this afternoon, Speaker John Bercow was urged to block future legal attempts to prevent the reporting of parliament, or to curtail MPs parliamentary privilege to speak freely.
Labour MP Paul Farrelly, whose question regarding Trafigura was the subject of the gag, asked Mr Bercow to investigate whether the Trafigura’s reprentatives, Carter Ruck, had acted in contempt of parliament.
Other members, including Lib Dem frontbencher David Heath and former shadow home secretary David Davis, also raised concerns.
Mr Bercow told MPs he would reflect on the matter, but insisted that the moves to gag The Guardian, which were dropped this afternoon, “in no way inhibited” parliamentary procedure.
“There is no queston of our own proceedure being in anyway inhibited. If the honorable member wants to pursue this as a matter of principle there is of couse, as he will doubtless know, an established procedure of raising it with me in writing,” he said.
#trafigura has now dropped off the top ten Twitter trending topics.
Marc Ambinder for The Atlantic Online, The Guardian Gets To Speak, But Britain Deserves A Free Press:
In practice, when compared to, well, almost every other country in the history of the world, Britain’s press has flourished. But it has done so without the type of prior right that gives the press in the U.S. its moral force. While the press cannot print anything it wants in either the U.S. or Britain, it is much easier in Britain for an entity to obtain a pre-publication injunction, or for some to win a libel lawsuit, or for parliament to bottle up debate, or for government to prevent journalists from publishing secrets. It is much harder to obtain information from the government. Still, it should be remarked that, believe or not, the Supreme Court of the United States did not formally agree that the government could not prevent the press from revealing “scandalous and defamatory” matter until 1933, in Near v. Minnesota.
It’s not so much that an expressed free press right would have resolved this dispute the right way.We’re still debating the limits of the bill of rights in this country. And in the U.K., the right to report on what someone says in parliament — or on the questions submitted to be answered by a minister of government — is already established in statute. But the existence of a constitutional right would shift the burden away from the interests with relatively less power than the state, the lawyers and the company.
Ian Reeves for Centre for Journalism, The injunction that failed, thanks to Twitter:
The digital revolution is about to lead to a legal one.
Tweet from @DistantHopes : Holy crap. Unless I miss my guess, check out how the disgraced #Trafigura literally had its name wiped from Twitscoop. [YouTube] 
Associated Press, The truth is already out there: Twitter users thwart oil company’s attempt to gag media.
LONDON (AP) — Bloggers and Twitter users thwarted a legal attempt Tuesday to stop Britain’s media from reporting the questions posed by a lawmaker in a parliamentary debate, spotlighting the power of new media to influence public policy.
Alan Brookland, My advice to Trafigura – just wait it out:
Before everyone gets too self-congratulatory, does any of this brief flirtation with online interest ever actually change anything? True, right now, lots of people who had probably never even heard of Trifigura will now be reading up on the dumping story, but, come tomorrow or next week, how many will still remember much about it? The bloggers will chalk up a victory and in this case the gagging order was actually lifted, but this is still an on-going case and nothing will have actually changed.
Sites like Twitter are excellent for catching a wave and occasionally rallying a large number of people behind a cause, but it’s yet to become the force for social change that it’s being made out to be. Real issues sadly aren’t resolved in an afternoon and a normally more complicated than 140 characters. If social media is really going to make the impact that it could, then we all need to keep an eye on the issues which we find important and persue them, not just jump on while it’s in the news and let it quietly die. Nag your MP, pester the mainstream media and ask the annoying questions, not just when the issue is in the news, but repeatedly. It’s only by proving that we can stay interested in an issue that change happens, otherwise people will just wait till the dust settles and everything will stay the same.
[PDF] The letter Index on Censorship sent to the courts in support of the Guardian.
Tweet from @pauloCanning : BBC #Radio4 news *finally (and briefly) reporting #gagcarterruck Fry gets quoted
Mike Butcher for Techcrunch, There’s nowhere to hide if your name trends on Twitter. Is there, Trafigura?
With the traditional media gagged, the new media had kicked in. That created a story which plenty of trad media outlets and blogs outside the UK could not ignore and started reporting on.
In other words, this kind of censorship is over. And I hope that British Libel law will change as a result. It must now move into the 21st Century and reflect new technology. After all, there is now a new defence. Feel libelled? You can defend your case just as much as the other guy online. Except of course if you are dumb enough not to register @carterruck, for instance.
Today’s UK Parliamentary questions over #trafigura gag order [YouTube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_J4ypytxaE
Guardian, Trafigura gag attempt unites house in protest:
Labour MP Paul Farrelly told the speaker, John Bercow, attempts by lawyers Carter-Ruck to gag the media could be a “potential contempt of parliament”.
The Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris said there was a need to “control the habit of law firms” of obtaining secrecy injunctions, and his colleague David Heath told the Commons a “fundamental principle” was being threatened: that MPs should be able to speak freely and have their words reported freely.
On the Conservative side, David Davies criticised the rising use of “super-injunctions”, in which the fact of the injunction is itself kept secret. He said courts should not be allowed to grant injunctions forbidding the reporting of parliament.
CharonQC, Lawcast 155: The Guardian Gag affair with Carl Gardner.
Catherine Mayer for Time: Twitter Triumphant: Attempts to Gag Newspaper Are Thwarted By Tweets:
Twitterers across the world colored their avatars green to show support for the protestors who took to Iran’s streets after the country’s disputed elections earlier this year. Users of the micro-blogging site might now consider overlaying their avatars with a film of sludge brown as a mark of their spontaneous, collective action to help undermine an attempt by the international oil traders Trafigura to gag a British newspaper reporting on a toxic dumping case.
Daily Mail, Law firm’s ‘Kafkaesque’ bid to block reporting of Parliamentary question is defeated – makes no mention of either Trafigura or Twitter!
Professional journal The Chemical Engineer has also been served with an injunction by Carter-Ruck for Trafigura.
Channel Four News report, Parliamentary question ban lifted.
Jon Snow talked to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and asked him what had happened after the publication of this morning’s paper.
He told Channel 4 News: “The blogosphere went berserk about a story that we published on our front page this morning, in which we said we can’t report a story for reasons we can’t tell you.
“After which there was about 16 hours of mayhem out there in the Twitter-sphere; and about an hour before we were due in court we received a letter from the lawyers saying ‘we give in’.
“What has changed was that for the past six weeks we have been faced with an injunction – a so-called super injunction – which not only meant not only could we not tell anyone we had been injuncted, but that we could not mention the company involved either – I think this is a very dangerous phase in English law.”
Tweet from @friendsofdarwin No mention of #trafigura or #carterruck on BBC 10 o’clock News. 5 minutes about racehorse’s retirement. #bbcfail
Gillian Shaw on canada.com, Twitter backs Guardian newspaper in fight for free speech: A win for all:
Today marked a watershed moment in which social media stepped in to quash an attempt to gag a newspaper.
Guardian, How super-injunctions are used to gag investigative reporting:
Libel lawyers Carter-Ruck and Schillings have proved adept at persuading judges that injunctions should now be granted on privacy grounds. Some tabloid newspapers are being served with “a handful” of such orders each week, according to media lawyers. The Guardian has been served with at least 12 notices of injunctions that could not be reported so far this year, compared with six in the whole of 2006 and five the year before.
The motivation is straightforward, according to Mark Stephens, a partner at law firm Finer Stephens Innocent. “As the libel and privacy capital of the world, people are coming here [to London] to bully the media and NGOs into not reporting on their nefarious activities,” he said.
Financial Times, Web’s effect on media law put to test:
Media lawyers, however, focused on the fact that the rulings of UK courts were not enforceable in the US.
Many of the servers hosting websites such as Facebook and Twitter are based in the US, meaning information cannot be suppressed.
Keith Ashby, head of litigation at Sheridans, said: “The difficulty is that injunctions cannot readily be obtained in the English courts against overseas internet service providers which would prevent them making the information available.”
Mr Ashby added: “If people get a whiff that publication of information has been injuncted in the print media, they are getting more canny about how to find the information on the internet.”
Michael Smyth, head of public policy at Clifford Chance, said: “We should not be surprised that the law finds it difficult to keep pace with technological advance and it is no answer in an era when judges are required to act proportionately to make a blanket order directed at the whole world.
“It is common practice for an injunction obtained against one newspaper to be copied to the whole of Fleet Street so that the market is aware of its terms and also bound by it. That’s the easy bit. What, however, of electronic publishers offshore about whom one knows next to nothing?” he added.
Mark Stephens of Finers Stephens Innocent agreed: “The issue with Twitter and SMS [text messaging] is that injunctions are not enforceable as you can’t stop people talking and in any case the servers which host these websites are in the US and outside the jurisdiction of the English courts.”
He pointed out that the order covering The Guardian was enforceable in England and Wales only, meaning that the Scottish and Irish media could report the parliamentary question.
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To Gag The Guardian!
or The Battle of Trafigura? (Allegedly) *
An attack has been made against free speech in parliament:
The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.
So from this story we can infer that Carter-Ruck have gagged the Guardian from reporting something for some reason. Internet consensus is building on what that is:
From Parliament.uk, “Questions for Oral or Written Answer beginning on Tuesday 13 October 2009″
(292409)
61
N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.
Whether or not Carter-Ruck have slapped a gagging order on the press in parliament for the first time in history (surely it’ll be undone before lunch tomorrow) on behalf of Trafigura is anyone’s guess. I mean we just don’t know. We do know that it was the Guardian which broke the story about Trafigura in the Ivory Coast (here and here), and that they were the only paper to have been gagged, but we couldn’t possibly conclude anything else.
* with due credit to James Graham
