Journalistic material in the UK criminal process

Protection Against Judicially Compelled Disclosure of the Identity of News Gatherers’ Confidential Sources in Common Law Jurisdictions

“…But for the injunction preventing publication of the source's information, the result in Goodwin might have been very different, a position many may find unsatisfactory. 225 Although Lord Woolf CJ's and May LJ's unreserved acceptance of the core positions in Goodwin and genuine efforts to address the merits from that perspective are encouraging, the judgments in Ashworth and Ackroyd (1) still retain some of the weaknesses of the standard common law approach. 226 Like the majority in British Steel, 227 the Lords in Ashworth too readily accepted AHA's limited evidence as to access to the information, the unfortunate speculation that the source must have been an employee and the character of that employee as a paid and disloyal person, not an unpaid public spirited informant.…”