Cases

Jameel & Another v Wall Street Journal Europe

Held

The defence of privilege failed. The jury's findings of fact had made it look somewhat forlorn. Although the subject-matter of the article was of the plainest public interest there was no duty to publish an article in these terms, and the Defendant would be adequately protected by the defence of justification. Key factors were: the underlying imputations in the article were at the higher level of gravity; there was no public interest in naming names, given that, on the Defendant's own account (a) the monitoring was supposed to be secret and (b) the US government had agreed not to name names in return for the Saudi government's cooperation; there was no urgency such as to justify publishing the story without having given the Claimants a meaningful opportunity to comment, especially since the Defendant had published the same story on the previous day without naming names.

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