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An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. "When a court employs the extraordinary remedy of injunction, it directs the conduct of a party, and does so with the backing of its full coercive powers." A party that fails to comply with an injunction faces criminal or civil penalties, including possible monetary sanctions and even imprisonment. They can also be charged with contempt of court.
A gag order is an order, typically a legal order by a court or government, restricting information or comment from being made public or passed onto any unauthorized third party. The phrase may sometimes be used of a private order by an employer or other institution.
The 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump was a health crisis in Ivory Coast in which a ship registered in Panama, the Probo Koala, chartered by the Singaporean-based oil and commodity shipping company Trafigura Beheer BV, offloaded toxic waste to an Ivorian waste handling company which disposed of it at the port of Abidjan. The local contractor, a company called Tommy, dumped the waste at 12 sites in and around the city in August 2006. The dumping, which took place against a backdrop of instability in Abidjan as a result of the country's first civil war, allegedly led to the death of 7 and 20 hospitalisations, with a further 26,000 people treated for symptoms of poisoning.
WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021. From November 2022, numerous documents on the organisation's website became inaccessible. In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks is no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.
In the United States, censorship involves the suppression of speech or public communication and raises issues of freedom of speech, which is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Interpretation of this fundamental freedom has varied since its enshrinement. Traditionally, the First Amendment was regarded as applying only to the Federal government, leaving the states and local communities free to censor or not. As the applicability of states rights in lawmaking vis-a-vis citizens' national rights began to wane in the wake of the Civil War, censorship by any level of government eventually came under scrutiny, but not without resistance. For example, in recent decades, censorial restraints increased during the 1950s period of widespread anti-communist sentiment, as exemplified by the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In Miller v. California (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment's freedom of speech does not apply to obscenity, which can, therefore, be censored. While certain forms of hate speech are legal so long as they do not turn to action or incite others to commit illegal acts, more severe forms have led to people or groups being denied marching permits or the Westboro Baptist Church being sued, although the initial adverse ruling against the latter was later overturned on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court case Snyder v. Phelps.
Bank Julius Baer & Co. v. WikiLeaks, 535 F. Supp. 2d 980, was a lawsuit filed by Bank Julius Baer against the website WikiLeaks.
Carter-Ruck is a British law firm founded by Peter Carter-Ruck. The firm specialises in libel, privacy, international law and commercial disputes. The leading legal directories rank Carter-Ruck in the top tier of media, defamation and privacy lawyers in the UK.
The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attorney's attempt in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drew far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph. The effect exemplifies psychological reactance: where the desire to hide information instead makes its propagation more likely.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a former United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. A trans woman, Manning said in 2013 that she had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic politician, anarchist, poet, and activist. She was a Member of the Althing (MP) for the Southwest Constituency from 2013 to 2017, representing the Pirate Party, having been elected at the 2013 election. She was previously an MP for Reykjavík Constituency South from 2009 to 2013. In November 2017, she has announced to retire from politics "for now".
Meirion Jones is a Welsh journalist. He worked for the BBC from 1988 until 2015 and is now the editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman described Jones as "a dogged journalist with that obsessional, slightly nutty commitment that marks out all successful investigative reporters".
The British privacy injunctions controversy began in early 2011, when London-based tabloid newspapers published stories about anonymous celebrities that were intended to flout what are commonly known in English law as super-injunctions, where the claimant could not be named, and carefully omitting details that could not legally be published. In April and May 2011, users of non-UK hosted websites, including the social media website Twitter, began posting material connecting various British celebrities with injunctions relating to a variety of potentially scandalous activities. Details of the alleged activities by those who had taken out the gagging orders were also published in the foreign press, as well as in Scotland, where the injunctions had no legal force.
CTB v News Group Newspapers is an English legal case between Manchester United player Ryan Giggs, given the pseudonym CTB, and defendants News Group Newspapers Limited and model Imogen Thomas.
Dynadot is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar and web host company founded by software engineer Todd Han in 2002. Dynadot's headquarters is located in San Mateo, California, with offices in Zhengzhou and Beijing, China, as well as Toronto, Canada.
In English tort law, a super-injunction is a type of injunction that prevents publication of information that is in issue and also prevents the reporting of the fact that the injunction exists at all. The term was coined by a Guardian journalist covering the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump controversy that had resulted in Trafigura obtaining a controversial injunction. Due to their very nature media organisations are not able to report who has obtained a super-injunction without being in contempt of court.
Parliamentary privilege in the United Kingdom is a legal immunity enjoyed by members of the House of Commons and House of Lords designed to ensure that parliamentarians are able to carry out their duties free from interference. The privileges are freedom of speech, freedom from arrest on civil matters, freedom of access to the sovereign, and that 'the most favourable construction should be placed on all the Houses' proceedings'. Fair and accurate reporting of the proceedings of parliament is also protected by parliamentary privilege.
James Ball is a British journalist and author. He has worked for The Grocer, The Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed, The New European and The Washington Post and is the author of several books. He is the recipient of several awards for journalism and was a member of The Guardian team that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.
References
- ↑ "How the Trafigura story came to be told". The Guardian. 16 October 2009.
- ↑ Hall, Holly Kathleen (June 2013). "Super-Injunction, What's Your Function?". Communication Law and Policy. 18 (3): 309–347. doi:10.1080/10811680.2013.797305.
- ↑ Chadwick, Andrew (2017). "Power, Interdependence, and Hybridity in the Construction of Political News: Understanding WikiLeaks". The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power (Second ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 103–129. ISBN 978-0-19-069673-3.
