YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN UNIDENTIFIED
ADAM SPEKER QC
You have the right to
d e i f i t n e d i n U n i Rema Adam Speker was Called to the Bar in 1999 and took Silk in 2020, having been rated as one of only two ‘star individual’ juniors in defamation and privacy in the Chambers & Partners UK Bar Guide. Adam specialises in all aspects of media and communications law including defamation, privacy, breach of confidence, harassment and data protection.
When interviewing students for Middle Temple scholarships in April 2019, my panel asked a familiar question: ‘should those arrested or charged with criminal offences be anonymised and, if so, why’. Every single student said yes to anonymisation for defendants. None, so far as I can recall, referred to open
justice or its importance and, when asked why a suspect’s identity should be withheld, almost all cited the case of Liam Allan. Mr Allan’s case was in the news at the time. He was a student who had been charged with the rape of a fellow student and suspended from his university. His trial collapsed shortly before it was due to take place after it was
discovered that police had failed to disclose text messages revealing that the complainant had pestered Mr Allan for casual sex. To those students, to name someone as a suspect in the media or online who might turn out to be innocent, was simply unfair. At that time, Middle Temple scholarship applicants could have looked for support for their view from the joint dissenting judgment of Lords Kerr and Toulson in PNM (Khuja) v Times Newspapers [2017] UKSC 49. Khuja was a case concerned with reporting restrictions and whether an individual who had been investigated as part of a child sex grooming case who was never charged but was named in open court in the trials of others, was entitled to have his name withheld from the public. The judge at first instance dismissed the application for a reporting restriction on the basis that Mr Khuja’s identity had been revealed in open court. That decision was upheld in the Court of Appeal and by a majority in the Supreme Court. However, in a strong joint dissenting judgment, Lords Kerr and Toulson expressed their disagreement and identified: ‘increasing concern, judicial and extra-judicial, about the effect upon an innocent person’s reputation of the publication of the fact of his arrest’. ZXC v Bloomberg LLP [2020] EWCA Civ 611 concerned an appeal from a decision of a judge at first instance to find that the claimant, who had been investigated in respect of corruption allegations, was entitled to anonymity. The facts related to an investigation by a law enforcement agency into the claimant’s company and various of its personnel. ZXC was one of the company personnel who was investigated. Bloomberg obtained information about the investigation via a leak from the law enforcement agency. None of the individuals have been charged.
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2020 Middle Templar
