Newspapers to fight Super Injunction after Sunday Herald prints footballer's identity
Newspapers are expected to return to the High Court today in an attempt to overturn the super injunction imposed by a married Premier League footballer to prevent his name being linked with an alleged affair.
The action follows the Sunday Herald yesterday publishing the picture of the footballer who is attempting to sue Twitter on the front page of the paper.
The editor of The Sunday Herald has said that he does not plan on publishing the identities of further high profile people despite his newspaper’s decision to print the picture of the footballer.
Speaking to BBC Scotland, Richard Walker said that the paper had achieved its aim of beginning a debate having made headlines over its publishing of the footballer’s identity, having described the legal action to prevent newspapers from naming him as ‘unsustainable’.
Walker also challenged the view of several Scottish media lawyers that because the newspaper had not distributed in England where the Super Injunction was granted, he would be not be immune from prosecution. Walker said that it was his view that because Scotland has its own legal system, the injunction would also have had to have been granted by a Scottish court.
Media lawyer Campbell Deane of Bannatyne Kirkwood and France, legal advisors to The Drum, said that it did not matter that the newspaper was not published in England, as the publisher’s knew of the injunction and deliberately went against it.
Asked of his thoughts on potentially going to jail, Walker said that he was not ‘warm and fuzzy about the idea’.