I’m no great fan of the animal rights campaigning group Speak but according to this week’s Oxford Times, they have been dragged into a worrying legal battle over an Internet mailing list.
According to the paper, Speak’s main two, Robert Cogswell and Mel Broughton, face contempt charges on Mon 29 Jan at the High Court because they have refused to hand over the 700 email addresses of people that signed up to Speak’s mailing list.
This is potentially very worrying. It is one thing to prosecute Speak, which has been carrying out an aggressive and intolerant campaign against the building of an animal research lab in Oxford, but quite another to insist on people’s email addresses being handed over. There are massive questions of privacy and freedom of speech here.
I don’t have enough facts to hand, but according to the article, Mr Cogswell said that the order held against the pair proposed that the mailing list contents should be given to the university “so that individual members could be contacted and asked not to disseminate the name of the company” – that is the construction company building the lab.
Cogswell said Speak had decided not to release the list because it considered it a “fishing expedition” and an attempt to undermine the campaign.
Reality? Truth?
There are a number of things here that make me think it is not quite as the article paints it. For one, Speak has a very long track record of misrepresenting the reality of the situation. You need only read the reports on its website. Most recently, this clearly hopelessly biased report of a debate at the London School of Economics over animal testing only a week ago.
Plus the fact that Cogswell is using the legal terminology of a “fishing expedition” to argue against revealing the mailing list rather than the patently more obvious free speech implications may well demonstrate that things are not as they seem. Although I know it is all too easy in the heat of a court action to oversee the obvious. You can read Speak’s version of events at the last hearing on its website.
But it does appear that Oxford University requested the email addresses. It may have been trying the old trick of asking for far too much so it can look as though it is backing down in court and still walk away with what it wants.
Order, order!
The order in question – issued on 19 October 2006 by Mr Justice Gibbs – rather irritatingly doesn’t appear on the Oxford University webpage where it hosts its Speak information, and Speak hasn’t posted it either. I wonder if it has been sealed because it mentions the name of the construction company at the heart of the argument. I will endeavour to find out.
If the High Court has in fact granted an order which demands an organisation hand over its mailing list, if it is prepared to hand that list over to the complainant, and if it is willing to back that assertion up with contempt hearings, that it is not too hard to see that a dangerous legal precedent may be set.
I can foresee 100 different ways in which this approach can be abused, to the detriment of individual freedom. I don’t blame Oxford University for asking for the right, but if the Court has granted the request – especially if it didn’t first outline to Broughton and Cogswell what they could do in order to purge themselves of this particular element (for example send an email out to all subscribers pointing out that the order requires them not to name the construction company) – then it is very worrying indeed.
Checks and balances
And because Speak are pretty much beyond the pale for the legal profession because of their abject disregard for the law, it is all too possible that the usual legal overview of what goes on in the High Court has been lost.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the mailing list question has already been dealt with in UK law but if it has, I’m not aware of it. If it is the position that it is allowable for private email addresses on a mailing list to be handed over, not only does it need to be challenged but also the public needs to made aware of it.
Email list legal battle foggy but important at kierenmccarthy.co.uk
January 25, 2007 at 1:27 pm[…] Following on from my post earlier this week about a worrying legal issue where animal rights protestors were due in court on contempt charges for refusing to hand over full details of their email mailing list to Oxford University, I have looked into it further and – as ever – things are more complex than they appear. […]