Dear supporters

I am sorry to tell you that the Judge has rejected my case against IPSO.  This is a severe disappointment to my legal team and me, and will no doubt disappoint the Hacked Off Campaign which has been a valued backer over the last year.  

Significantly, my legal team had assessed that I had good prospects for success and was an ideal test case; I would not have proceeded otherwise.  

To reach the hearing we had first to: (a) establish that IPSO (a private body belonging to the press) was open to Judicial Review, and therefore on some level accountable in law, and; (b) get our case accepted “on the papers”.  We reached this point on 24^th October 2017, and this was already a major achievement.  

However Judge Warby, who presided over the hearing of 17^th April, took a very different view.  He was highly sceptical as to the Court’s jurisdiction over IPSO and declined to reach a conclusion on the matter.   And then he rejected the case on all the three grounds we had advanced, i.e. that IPSO had: 

• rejected a complaint because the ‘wrong person” (a third party) had brought it;
• refused to consider House of Lords evidence potentially favourable to the complainant, and;  
• employed irrational decision-making, allowing the Times and Sunday Times to publish misleading and inaccurate information so long as it appeared in ‘opinion articles’, and confusing the concepts of ‘inaccuracy’ and ‘significant inaccuracy’

The judge often used the word ‘discretion’, seemingly happy about IPSO’s use of its discretionary powers.    

Notwithstanding, every cloud has a silver lining, and there are some achievements and useful lessons for the future:

• This was the first ever Judicial Review of IPSO, and while the judge rejected the case, it has been formally assessed as having sufficient merit to be heard in court. On that basis, it was right and proper in terms of justice that it was heard. 
• The case vividly demonstrates that, even if IPSO is reviewable by the court, the costs of such proceedings put such challenges far beyond the reach of the ordinary complainant; for most people IPSO is a law unto itself and there is no practical redress even if it breaches its own rules. I myself face the prospect of voluminous legal fees.
• The judgment has highlighted the unsatisfactory character of the rules under which IPSO adjudicated our original cases against the newspapers.  Despite using the term 'findings of fact', the JR provided no ruling on the merits of the IPSO judgement, merely on whether, in its various points, that ruling conformed to the rules that the press industry wrote for IPSO. 
• The judge's ruling confirms that IPSO's rules give it wide discretion to pick and choose on spurious grounds, notably in this case that the ‘wrong person’ had brought the complaint, or to ‘characterise’ such and such a factual assertion (e.g. that people at the meeting were calling for ‘Israel to be wiped from the map’) as an expression of opinion.  IPSO often filters out complaints on such grounds, irrespective of how conclusively the evidence shows that the code may have been breached, making a mockery of the idea that this is a regulator seeking to ensure consistent respect for the industry code of practice.  

For these and other reasons, I shall remain in touch with you - - - and hope to hear back.  If you haven’t already done so, please look at the stuff on my website www.freeexpressionforall.org and sign up for updates and send me any relevant information

Thanks for your continued support, and please share.

Best wishes

Jonathan Coulter

What is IPSO?

IPSO is a regulatory organ established by the press industry in 2014, with an alleged mission to uphold standards in news publishing and to protect the public from the effects of unethical conduct.  It is supposed to do this by enforcing a code written for it by newspaper editors.

In practice IPSO is modelled closely on the failed Press Complaints Commission (PCC), in defiance of the Leveson Inquiry, and as such tends to put the interests of the industry before those of the public. A few facts will help you understand this:

• It has a set of arbitrary internal rules that enable it to cherry-pick which complaints it will actually look into, enabling newspapers to defy their own code of practice with impunity.  This feature is much evident in this case. 
• Like the old PCC, IPSO has powers of investigation but never uses them; it only responds to complaints
• Unlike the PCC, it has a power to impose fines, but again it never does so
• Even when it upholds complaints against newspapers, its interpretation of ‘due prominence’ for corrections allows editors to bury their mistakes on inside pages.
• In one year IPSO received 8,148 complaints relating to discrimination (much of it against Muslims) but upheld just one of them

This case against IPSO

On October 25^th 2016, a meeting was organised by a group called ‘the Palestinian Return Centre’ and chaired by Baroness Tonge.  Two articles about it in the Times and one in the Sunday Times grossly misreported the meeting, causing no less than 30 of those present to complain that the articles unjustifiably represented the meeting as anti-Semitic in character. IPSO upheld one aspect of the complaint, but dismissed the rest.

One of the complainants, Jonathan Coulter, applied for a judicial review of IPSO’s handling of the original complaints, is challenging three fundamental elements of IPSO’s modus operandi:

– rejection of complaints on the grounds that the ‘wrong person’ has brought them - you might think that the identity of the complainant is insignificant beside the question of whether the Editors’ Code has been a breached, but IPSO provides newspapers with a trap-door;

– allowing papers to publish misleading and inaccurate information so long as it appears in so-called ‘opinion articles’, and;

– the limited way in which IPSO seeks to establish the facts of a case, including refusal to consider evidence favourable to complainants.

The High Court accepted the case for consideration last October, and it is being heard on 17th April.

What will a win mean in this case?

If Coulter is successful the regulator will have to consider the complaints afresh, but in practice the significance will probably be much greater, requiring substantial change to the way IPSO goes about its business.

The timing of this case is also auspicious, as it comes just before the House of Commons votes on amendments to the ‘Data Protection Act’. This seeks to reverse the Government’s recent decision to shelve the second part of the Leveson Inquiry and ‘Section 40’ of the Crime and Courts Act 2013; the latter is designed to relieve complainants and the Press from excessive legal costs.

Above all, a win would strike a blow for freedom of expression in this country. As Jonathan Coulter, puts it:

We have a magnificent tradition of free speech going back over 300 years, despite which, people often refrain from speaking up on contentious topics for fear of being attacked or smeared in the press, while lacking the financial means to secure redress. 

They often face powerful business and political interests with large PR budgets and the means to get their ‘stories’ planted in multiple news outlets at once. This tends to stifle freedom of expression, and frustrate democratic processes. 

However, a win in this case will send a warning shot across the bows of newspapers, encourage them to check their facts before publishing, and help Hacked Off and Parliament to advance the cause of press reform.

For further information See Hacked Off Campaign’s press release and Brian Cathcart’s recent article.  A website with updates will shortly available at freeexpressionforall.org