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permanent, and that a refusal of injunctive relief may cause irreparable harm and effectively deprive the plaintiff of his right.
In the present case, the conflict of competing public interests is said to be acute, and to raise constitutional issues of great importance. Mr Lester was at pains to emphasise that this was the first time in this country that the executive branch of government had sought to invoke the judicial branch to suppress the publication of information about the workings of government on matters of legitimate public concern; information, moreoever, which may confirm that there have been serious malpractices and unlawful activity by senior members of the Security Service. If, Mr Lester said, the Attorney General succeeded in this case, then he would succeed in any case where confidential information was involved and national security invoked, no matter how great the public scandal that disclosure would
uncover.
I am not impressed by those arguments. Each case must depend on its own facts. The press is not immune from prior restraint where the publication of confidential information is threatened; the Court must in each case consider the consequences to the public of granting or withholding the injunctions sought. There are no absolutes. Just as the right to preserve confidentiality is not unqualified and may be overridden where disclosure is in the public interest, so the freedom of the press is not absolute but, in the case of confidential information, is qualified by the need to show that publication is in the public interest. It makes no difference that the claim to suppress publication is made by the Government and not by a private litigant; the principles remain the same. Nor does the Court abdicate its responsibility to decide where the public interest lies merely because national security is invoked by the Crown. The safeguard in
a free society is that the conflict falls to be resolved not by the State itself but by an independent judiciary.
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or buffer, if you like
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The
I say at once that I make no apology for reading that passage in extenso. Apart from the relevance to the issue, I have to decide, it also demonstrates the role of the judiciary where a State is seeking to suppress information. judiciary is a bulwark
against unfettered and arbitrary suppression of information by the State. It is a buffer against censorship. Thus is the position in Hong Kong. There can be no question of it becoming frighteningly easy, as Mr Lester said, for a future Government to regulate what the public can and cannot know, unless, that is, it is implied I'm sure that it wasn't, at least not by Mr Lester that the
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