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Name revelation
By Steven | January 22, 2010
I see that Whale Oil has been publishing a series of posts under the heading “Interesting names” that contain nothing but a person’s name. I might take a wild stab in the dark and guess that those were names that had been suppressed. Is he breaking the law?
It’s an offence to publish a name (or identifying details) “in any report or account relating to the proceedings”. No doubt Mr Oil is relying on that clause. Of course, it wouldn’t be a breach of a name suppression order protecting someone accused of assault, for example, to report that he had just won a flower show, without mentioning the criminal proceedings at all. So just publishing a name in a vaccuum would seem to put Mr Oil in the clear. And after all, publishing names this way does protect any victims and doesn’t do an awful lot of harm to the defendants.
Still. I think he’s still dicing with danger. The courts have interpreted the “relating to the proceedings” clause fairly widely (though not this widely) in the past. They are unlikely to be sympathetic to him. They may feel, given the context of his campaign, that this series of posts does relate to proceedings. More likely, the charge may be one of evading or attempting to evade a suppression order, which doesn’t require a “report or account relating to the proceedings”. In any event, he’d better be pretty careful with his comments threads. If others make links between his names and particular proceedings, that could compromise his defence.
Topics: Name suppression, Suppression orders | Comments Off on Name revelation