iMediaEthics wrote last month when UK attorney general Dominic Grieve “warned” tweeters that they could face contempt of court charges for violating injunctions. Specifically, last month tweeters violated an injunction and named soccer player Ryan Giggs as holding an injunction to prevent his being named in an alleged affair. We wrote to Grieve’s office to find out if there would be any charges.
James Ross, a representative from Grieve’s correspondence unit, told iMediaEthics that Grieve “does not have a general enforcement role in respect of civil injunctions. Normally an aggrieved party would be expected to bring proceedings to protect their interests, and individuals may well be pursuing such actions following the breaches of injunctions on Twitter.”
While Ross noted that Grieve “can bring proceeding himself if he considers that the public interest warrants it,” Grieve hasn’t “initiated any proceedings following these breaches.”
iMediaEthics has written to Keith Schilling, who is listed as an attorney for Ryan Giggs, asking for information about any possible charges against tweeters violating the injunction as well. We will update with any response.
We also asked GigaOm senior writer Mathew Ingram, who defended the ability to comment anonymously last year, asking if the issues of anonymous commenting and anonymous tweeting could be compared.
Ingram replied that “in this case, I think that outing the anonymous tweeters you’re referring to was driven by a more important principle, which was to overturn the injunctions and super-injunctions issued by the British court, which (in my view) are an outrageous infringement on freedom of speech.”