Disclosure of sources

Ashworth Hospital Authority v MGN Ltd (H of L TLR 1 July)

Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 provides: ‘No court may require a person to disclose… the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible, unless it be established… that disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice…’ The defendants had published in the Mirror an article which included verbatim extracts from the medical reports of Ian Brady, one of the Moors murderers, a patient at Ashworth Security Hospital and at that time engaged on a well publicised hunger strike. The judge had ordered the defendants to make and serve on the authority a witness statement explaining how they had come into possession or control of Mr Brady’s medical records and identifying any employee of the authority and the name of the person or persons involved in their acquisition. The author of the article had said that he did not know the identity of the initial source of the information, but assumed it to be an employee of Ashworth. He did know the identity of the intermediary who had supplied the material to him. Knowledge of the identity of the intermediary would in all probability lead to the identity of the original source. The intermediary had been paid £1,500. In view of the need for the integrity of hospital medical records to be protected, the House upheld the order made against the publishers for disclosure of the source of information originating in those records and used in the article published in the newspaper.