As I'm sure you know by now Trafigura has dropped the gagging order against the Guardian which prevented the paper from reporting a parliamentary question mentioning the company, a freedom supposedly guaranteed by the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Trafigura and law firm Carter Ruck scored a spectacular PR own goal - within minutes of the gagging story appearing on the Guardian website last night it was all over Twitter and the blogosphere. As I went to bed at around 1am last night the words "trafigura" "carter ruck" "dumping" and "toxic waste" were being tweeted over and over by Twitter users, including me, to spread the word and raise awareness by getting the topic trending on Twitter. By the time Stephen Fry tweeted this morning dubbing the injunction "a barbaric assault on free speech" hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of Trafigura before knew all about their evil actions dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was preparing to challenge the injunction in court at 2pm when the news arrived that Trafigura had buckled in the face of the barrage of a negative online publicity. At around 12.50pm he tweeted "Victory! #CarterRuck caves-in. No #Guardian court hearing. Media can now report Paul Farrelly's PQ about #Trafigura".
You can listen to Rusbridger discuss the whole affair in this Guardain podcast - it seems that the Guardian was under a "super-injunction", which prevented it both from reporting on Trafigura and from mentioning the fact it was under an injunction. When it learnt that a parliamentary question about the company was going to be asked by Paul Farrelly MP, it contacted Carter Ruck who happily provided the public cause the paper was after by replying that the question was covered by the injunction and the Guardian would be in contempt of the court's order in reporting it.
Although I've not yet had this confirmed, I'd be very surprised if the Guardian didn't work with Farrelly, who is a vocal critic of our libel laws, on this. Indeed, as Sarah Ditum writes, the whole course of events from the carefully coded initial Guardian non-coverage of the story, to the Farrelly question, to Rusbridger and his colleagues' hyper-active tweeting, suggests that the Guardian "gamed" Trafigura and Carter-Ruck with a brilliantly executed counter-punch.
As someone who was following this and participating on Twitter and the blogs, I can tell you, it was nice to be on the winning side for a change. Liberal tweeters and bloggers from left and right - we all pulled together, proving that there's nothing the internet likes more than sharing information someone else wants kept secret. These occasional righteous outbursts of online frenzy are fun, especially on Twitter, but victory is rarely so clear cut or soon. The key now, as Sunder Katwala argues in a typically thoughtful post at Next Left, is to sustain public alarm and anger at this issue into a wider campaign against the UK's draconian libel laws and shed some light onto the murky activities of people like Carter Ruck.
In the meantime those wishing to find out more about the UK's pernicious libel laws should check out this video of the Press Freedom session at the Convention on Modern Liberty. Alan Rusbridger is on the panel along with Nick Cohen, Andrew Gilligan and Fatima Bhutto and it is chaird by Tory PPC Joanne Cash.
(Update: The Guardian has published its account of the whole affair which explains the use of so-called "super injunctions" and includes an extraordinary reply from Carter Ruck. Contrary to my initial understanding it also seems that the injunction is to prevent the Guardian reporting on the Minton Report on Trafigura's activities, which is what Farrelley asked about, rather than, as I suggested, to prevent reporting of anything to do with Trafigura).
