The Not So Super Injunction

How the British government covered up an extraordinary leak about at-risk Afghans.

In 2009, a reporter at The Guardian, in the UK, obtained a preliminary scientific report that Trafigura, a trading company, had commissioned a few years earlier, after a contractor for the firm dumped tons of allegedly toxic waste in the African nation of Côte d’Ivoire. When The Guardian approached Trafigura about the report, it responded by taking out what is known as a “superinjunction”—a mysterious mechanism that not only blocked The Guardian from covering the report, but from saying that it was blocked from covering the report. A few days later, WikiLeaks published the report online. Shortly after that, Paul Farrelly, a journalist turned lawmaker with the governing Labour Party, mentioned the superinjunction in Parliament; he was protected in doing so by a form of legal immunity for lawmakers. The existence of the order was now public—but, extraordinarily, lawyers for Trafigura insisted that it still applied, gagging The Guardian from reporting something that had happened in a national legislature. (“Guardian gagged from reporting parliament,” the paper wrote in a headline, before suggesting that the situation appeared to jeopardize free-speech protections dating back to 1688.) In the end, outraged readers spread Farrelly’s question all over Twitter, as it was then known, and Trafigura relented. “Trafigura thought it was buying silence,” Alan Rusbridger, then the editor of The Guardian, wrote at the time. “A combination of old media—The Guardian—and new—Twitter—turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.” (Incidentally, ICYMI, we interviewed Rusbridger on CJR’s podcast last week.)