If you are in the UK, how do you know which people you aren't allowed to publish stories about? How do you know if a super injunction is in force? Are they published somewhere?
You don't. That's what makes this whole deal so annoying -- you can accidentally break the law and be liable for imprisonment (contempt of court) or horrendous damages without knowing why.
People above are mentioning how super injunctions violate an American's conception of the right to free speech, but I think this is the more troubling aspect: that it violates the journalist's right to due process. I'll grant that ignorance of the law isn't usually a good defense, but when the law (or in this case, court order) is kept secret, what other defense can you use?
What about the rest of us -- those of us who aren't newspaper journalists and on whom the injunctions are not served, but who may nevertheless be liable for contempt of court if we tweet or blog about something we read on, say, a foreign web site?
We don't know that republishing the information is in contempt of court, but ignorance of the law is not (and never has been) a defense -- at best it's merely a mitigating factor for the court to consider when handing down a sentence.
> We don't know that republishing the information is in contempt of court
It's clearly not, since republishing information (in this case, a statement from an MP using parliamentary privilege) is how we knew about Trafigura and other issues covered by a superinjunction.
I'm not sure why you are downvoted for that, that's exactly what happens; the press get contacted telling them who they can't talk about.
The general public isn't informed (that's the point of a superinjunction) but how would they know about this anyway if they didn't know the subjects personally? Presumably there is some protocol for people who may be aware of what's censored, but suggesting that people can "accidentally fall foul of the law" is as realistic as suggesting a room of 7 billion monkeys randomly hitting typewriter keys will come up with Shakespeare.
