This is why superinjunctions are antithetical to democracy

I was once smacked with a superinjunction... and lived to tell the full Kafkaesque tale. So I have a lot of sympathy for The Independent and other media organisations who, for nearly two years, have been forced to sit on a story that the British state didn't want told.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

My own experience of being gagged involved an unappetising company called Trafigura, which had been caught dumping toxic chemicals off west Africa in 2006. The company had shelled out more than £30m in compensation and legal costs to 30,000 inhabitants of Abidjan in Ivory Coast who claimed to have been affected by the dumping.

Trafigura was keen to suppress the findings of an internal report that could have proved embarrassing. So it obtained an injunction to stop The Guardian from publishing it – and then, for good measure, a further injunction to prevent us from revealing the existence of the original injunction.

Welcome to superinjunctions, which were, for a while, sprayed around like legal confetti – often by errant footballers keen to keep their off-pitch escapades secret. The Trafigura case represented a novel application of the law, to silence investigative journalism – seemingly contradicting the only dictum about the courts that most people are familiar with: the principle that justice must be seen to be done.

Trafigura went one step further. When a Labour MP tabled a question about its use of a superinjunction, its lawyers, the unlovely company Carter-Ruck, even warned newspapers that they would be in contempt of court if they dared mention this parliamentary intervention. That was plainly ludicrous. Trafigura’s legal pitbulls had lost sight of the fact that people risked their liberty and their lives to fight for the right to report what their elected representatives say and do. The superinjunction collapsed like an undercooked souffle.

And here we are 16 years later, discovering that, for 683 days, a tiny handful of lawyers, judges, politicians and civil servants were stopping the press from telling the most extraordinary story of how a hapless MoD official caused a catastrophic data breach that put the lives of thousands of Afghans in peril.