UK press up in arms against court ruling on regulation

Britain's newspaper industry said yesterday that it will appeal against a High Court dismissal of its plea to block approval for a new cross-party Royal Charter on press regulation.

Editors say their alternative proposals have not been properly considered by the court.

Earlier in the day, Lord Justice Richards threw out an application by newspaper body PressBof for an injunction of a meeting of the Privy Council at which the Government Royal Charter was to be approved, thus blocking an attempt by newspapers to thwart the charter on the regulation of the press.

The Privy Council, a body which includes the Queen, is expected to approve Parliament's charter shortly.

Under the charter, a new regulator, overseen by a watchdog, will draw up a standards code and impose fines.

Front page of the final issue

The matter of press regulation emerged following the phone-hacking affair which killed News Of The World, a popular Murdoch family newspaper and led to the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics and practices of newspapers (Scandal-hit News of the World shuts down after 168 years).

Publishers are now running out of time to try to stop the politicians' charter, which they say could allow governments to encroach on press freedom.

Earlier yesterday, the judges refused publishers a last-minute injunction and said there were no grounds for a judicial review.

In a joint statement, newspapers said, "We are deeply disappointed with this decision, which denies the newspaper and magazine industry the right properly to make their case that the Privy Council's decision to reject their charter was unfair and unlawful.

"This is a vital constitutional issue and we will be taking our case for judicial review - of the Privy Council's decisions on both the industry charter and the cross-party charter - to the Court of Appeal."

The newspapers learned their alternative proposals had been rejected by the Privy Council earlier this month because they did not comply with certain principles from the Leveson report, such as independence and access to arbitration.

UK culture secretary Maria Miller welcomed the court's ruling, saying, "Both the press and the government think that the best way forward is for us to have self-regulation of the press and the principles for that are set out in a royal charter.

"The decisions today mean that we can move forward with that and we will continue to work with the industry to make sure this is a success.

"The most important thing is that we retain the freedom of the press which is such an important part of our democratic process but that we have a way of giving people redress if there have been mistakes and errors made and I think that's a shared objective between the press and the government."

Earlier, Roger Alton, executive editor of The Times, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme, "The idea that somehow a deal stitched up between a few politicians over pizzas and a handful of lobbyists from Hacked Off, which is essentially an anti-newspaper group, the idea that such a deal is the thing that now controls the press, which is one of the most vital safeguards in our democracy, I find extraordinarily depressing, very sad ... it will be resisted."

Both politicians and the press agreed there should be a "recognition panel" to oversee a press self-regulation committee with powers to impose fines on newspapers for wrongdoing.