UK Law Seeks to Send Libel Claims Against Newspapers to Arbitration

A public consultation regarding Section 40 of the United Kingdom’s Crime and Courts Act of 2013 was completed last week.  The highly contentious law was created in response to a legal inquiry that recommended judicial and other legal remedies should be made more readily available to members of the general public.  Under Section 40, low-cost arbitration proceedings would be offered to libel claimants through a government-approved press regulator such as IMPRESS or via the Independent Press Standards Organisation (“IPSO”).  Although Section 40 was previously approved, the law has not yet been implemented.

In a government submission, Alastair Brett, a British media attorney and former legal manager at the Times and Sunday Times, reportedly proposed that all libel disputes filed against a UK publisher be decided using fast-track arbitration performed by an independent organization instead of a regulator.  According to Brett, implementing Section 40 as written would unnecessarily penalize newspapers that choose not to become affiliated with a regulator due to free press concerns by forcing the publisher to pay additional court costs in a libel action regardless of the outcome.

Instead of utilizing a more limited arbitration scheme such as the pilot program currently operated by IPSO, Brett argued in his submission that fast-track arbitration is the most effective way to hold not only newspapers, but all publishers who place information into the public domain, accountable to libel claimants.

The media lawyer stated:

In short, there should be an industry wide fast track arbitration scheme for all publishers, broadcasters and others, which is independent of Ipso or Impress.

And any such arbitration scheme should have to be approved by the Civil Procedure Rules Committee of the high court with the help of specialist libel judges, not the PRP which seems happy to approve all sorts of differing arbitration schemes when it has little or no experience of complex privacy or libel actions.

The law is the law. How members of the public are given quick, fair and cost effective access to justice is the real issue. Fast track arbitration, like ABTA’s one for travel agents, is the answer.

If we want to move forward by helping people with a genuine grievance against a newspaper we must strip away the restrictions on the Ipso pilot arbitration scheme.

In so doing, we must make it applicable to all broadcasters and publishers of whatever kind; entrench in it provisions which prevent the system being misused by opportunist claimants (ie, an effective strike out mechanism) and then simplify the way an arbitration can be started with the key issue being decided on day one.

As written, a Section 40 arbitration scheme would only be made available to publishers who are affiliated with an organization like IMPRESS or IPSO.

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