Tariq Khuja’s effort to win a privacy injunction initially went to the High Court, where it was rejected by Mr Justice Tugendhat in October 2013.
He ruled that the proposed newspaper articles were “likely to . . . make an important contribution to the knowledge of the public and to debates about the administration of justice”.
The judge acknowledged that Mr Khuja “clearly has grave fears about the nature of any press reporting and of the consequences” but emphasised that “a criminal trial is a public event”. He said that most people “will understand the difference between suspicion and guilt, and will know that a person is to be presumed innocent unless and until proved guilty”.
“In my judgment there is sufficient public interest in publishing a report of the proceedings which identifies the claimant . . . to justify any resulting curtailment of his right and his family’s right to respect for their private and family life.
“Such reports may well lead to witnesses coming forward, including those who might rebut any allegations concerning the claimant.”
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Lawyers for Mr Khuja challenged the ruling, but in a judgment handed down in July 2014 the Court of Appeal again dismissed his wish for anonymity.
Lady Justice Sharp warned that to allow the erosion of open justice to protect the privacy of those who feared “damaging publicity from a criminal trial” would have a “seriously chilling effect” on press freedom and would be “very damaging indeed to the public interest”.
The final act was staged at the highest court in the land. In January, four years after the trial in which he was named, seven justices took their seats for a two-day hearing at the Supreme Court.
Manuel Barça, QC, for Mr Khuja, accused The Times and the Oxford Mail of attempting “to subvert the open justice principle” by using it as a ruse to justify the publication of private information.
“The press acts as an extension of the courtroom, as the eyes and ears of the publicLord Sumption
Gavin Millar, QC, for the newspapers, referred to an earlier case in which the Court of Appeal described the media’s right to report criminal trials as “the embodiment of the principle of open justice in a free country”.
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In its judgment, published yesterday, the Supreme Court dismissed Mr Khuja’s appeal by a 5-2 majority, ruling that he had “no reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to proceedings heard in open court”. Handing it down, Lord Sumption described the appeal as “the latest chapter in the long-running contest between the freedom of the press and the right to private and family life”.
He noted that The Times had taken “a close interest in investigating and reporting on allegations that police and child protection authorities have failed adequately to confront a pattern of crime involving the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young teenage girls by older men”.
The newspaper wanted to report the evidence of a young witness at the 2013 trial who said she was sexually abused as a child by a man named Tariq. Mr Khuja had “never been charged, let alone convicted, of any offence connected to the Oxford child-prostitution ring and there is no present reason to believe that he ever will be”.
Lord Sumption accepted there was a “real risk that many people, knowing what was said about him at the Old Bailey trial, would conclude that he was the person called Tariq who the victim said had sexually abused her”.
The injunction must nevertheless be refused because “proceedings in court are public acts of state, and, as such, open to public scrutiny. The press acts as an extension of the courtroom, as the eyes and ears of the public.”
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The potential “collateral damage” to Mr Khuja’s reputation was “part of the price to be paid for open justice and the freedom of the press to report fairly and accurately judicial proceedings held in public”.
