Despite having mysteriously disappeared from the BBC website, you can still see the Newsnight piece on Trafigura on YouTube.

When, following the recent fiasco around Trafigura, I saw Carter-Ruck partner Andrew Stephenson at a Parliamentary committee meeting, he seemed utterly unrepentent.

Carter Ruck’s attempt, on behalf of Trafigura, to ban the media from reporting a question in the British Parliament, had triggered calls for the company’s Directors to be dragged to the bar of the House of Commons and formally reprimanded. Justice Minister Bridget Prentice had reiterated that the 1688/9 Bill of Rights, gave the media an absolute privelege to cover the proceedings of Parliament, and that this was essential for the effective functioning of our democracy.

In seeking to explain his firm’s behaviour to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, Stephenson certainly appeared defensive, but he didn’t seem in the least bit sorry. He did, though, seem keen to reassure us that the injunction secured by his company on Trafigura’s behalf had been intended merely as an interim holding measure, and that the original purpose had never been to gag the reporting of Parliament.

So it seems very surprising to read in today’s Sunday Times that Stephenson appears to have gone out of his way to persuade the Commons authorities that the law does, after all, allow for the gagging of Parliamentary procedure:

In a submission to a Commons select committee, Carter-Ruck, a law firm that specialises in libel, argues that newspapers and publishers would be in contempt of court if they published parliamentary questions, answers or debates that fell under super-injunctions.

Advisers to John Bercow, the Speaker, are understood to have informed the culture, media and sport committee that Carter-Ruck’s position is correct. MPs regard the position as a serious threat to free speech and the proper functioning of democracy.

Super-injunctions — under which even reporting the existence of the injunction is banned — are increasingly being used to stop the media publishing information. MPs are now concerned that they threaten the media’s right to report what MPs can freely say in parliament, a privilege affirmed in the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840…

At the time of the disagreement, Bridget Prentice, the justice minister, said Carter-Ruck was wrong to claim super-injunctions applied to the reporting of parliamentary proceedings.

However, in a submission to the culture committee published last week, Andrew Stephenson, a senior partner at the firm, said the minister was under a “misapprehension”.

He said that while MPs were guaranteed the right to free speech under the 1688 Bill of Rights within the House of Commons, the reporting of parliament remained subject to court orders.

The Speaker’s counsel declined to comment, but is understood to agree with Stephenson’s assessment.

So it seems, after all, that Parliamentary democracy is still under attack, and that Carter-Ruck may be making headway in their attempt to overturn a centuries-old democratic freedom.

What I think this demonstrates, again, is that Carter-Ruck is not just an ordinary law firm, doing what ordinary law firms do. They are actively engaged in lobbying the government to curtail our liberties in the interests of their clients. They are behaving, in other words, like a right-wing activist group.

Presumably if the goverment takes this issue seriously enough, they will table emergency legislation which makes the absolute right to report Parliament fully explicit. In the meantime, judges could presumably ensure that any secret injuction they do grant includes a statement spelling out that the measure does not apply to the reporting of Parliament.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, there’s also a pretty clear-cut ethical case for (peaceful, legal) direct political action against Carter-Ruck. The idea that a lawyer – or indeed any other professional – should be exempted from the moral consequences of their professional choices is, in my view, a self-serving myth.

Lawyers who seek to apply an unjust law – be that the law that jailed Oscar Wilde or the laws being used today to suppress freedom of speech – don’t evade moral accountability simply by hiding behind the fact that what they’re doing is ‘legal’. I can’t help but wonder if we might have avoided some of the trouble we’re now in if more had been done to challenge unethical companies like Carter-Ruck at an earlier stage.

But lastly, there has to be a question here about practicality. However much Carter Ruck and their corporate clients might like to suppress free speech through the use of one secret injunction after another, the recent Twitter-storm around Trafigura has shown that this can sometimes be impossible in practice.

If Carter-Ruck are right and Bridget Prentice is wrong, then it seems that I may, after all, have been in contempt of court when I posted the ‘banned’ Parliamentary Question on Twitter back in October. Would I be willing to do so again? I wouldn’t rule it out. And it strikes me that now would be a good time to get a head-count of bloggers and Tweeters prepared to consider engaging in peaceful civil disobedience should Carter-Ruck – or anyone else – attempt to gag the reporting of Parliament again. You can leave a comment here or email me via richardcameronwilson AT yahoo DOT co DOT UK.

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We’re going to ‘flashmob’ Trafigura ( 2 Portman Street, London W1H 6DU ) at 1pm on Thursday November 26th. The main aim is to highlight the fact that Trafigura/Carter Ruck are, even now, still suing the BBC for libel - (over this report) and thus continuing to cast a chill over the UK media.

The key feature of the protest will be an act of defiance against Trafigura’s attempt to stop the reporting of the fact that their toxic waste is alleged to have caused a number of deaths (ie. not just ‘flu-like symptoms’).

The plan is to quote verbatim from Hansard, as (despite some uncertainty recently) we know that we have an absolute legal right to quote from Parliamentary proceedings.

According to Evan Harris MP (quoted here in a Parliamentary debate, hence we can quote him):

“Newsnight” is being threatened by the lawyers for Trafigura, Carter-Ruck, if it repeats an allegation against Carter-Ruck that deaths were caused by the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast, even though in 2007 Hansard reported the Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations laid by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs before Parliament, and a memorandum of explanation to those regulations stated:

“The recent example of the release of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast leading to the deaths of a number of people and the hospitalisation of thousands underlines the risks involved in the movement and management of waste.”

How can it be that that can be in Hansard, yet there are still threats of legal action against “Newsnight” if it reports the very same wording that is used in there?

So the plan is to turn up outside their offices with as many people (and cameraphones, mini-video cams, etc.) as possible, and recite this text – either all of the above, or just the two lines Harris is quoting from the ‘memorandum’.

The highlight will be Sly and Reggie, with their “Suburban Pirate” mobile (a lovely old Morris pickup), which has a public address system they will employ to a similar purpose, together with the rather good song they’ve recorded specifically on this subject.

There’s a rumour that (subject to local byelaws) we’ll also be drinking a toast to freedom outside Trafigura’s office, with some banana bread beer…

The man who created the modern libel industry was a dedicated liar and a reactionary with a lust for cash

• David Hooper
• The Guardian, Tuesday 23 December 2003 07.36 GMT
• Article history

The libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, who died on Friday, had a chilling effect on the media. He was a chancer, out for the maximum fee. And he did for freedom of speech what the Boston Strangler did for door-to-door salesmen.

Until Carter-Ruck got his teeth into the libel law, actions were infrequent and inexpensive. But from the 1950s, Carter-Ruck became the leading libel lawyer and clients sought him out. He honed his menacing letters to encourage socialites to sue for imagined slights and fashion a weapon for politicians to suppress hostile stories. He preferred the bludgeon of the writ to the rather more effective call to an editor preferred by Lord Goodman. He established the idea that libel law was complicated and merited very high fees. In the process he became very rich. "I like to bill the clients as the tears are flowing," he told me.

Libel was good to him: four homes, a Rolls-Royce and a string of yachts called Fair Judgement. But perniciously he built a libel factory, paid for by the media's legal and insurance bills. Carter-Ruck had some novel techniques. You could only settle a libel action by paying his exorbitant fees without any question of the bill being checked by the court. He hit upon the wheeze of Randolph Churchill retaining all the libel QCs to prevent them acting for Private Eye (a practice since banned) and of serial libel actions, as in the case of Princess Elizabeth of Toro (which brought us the term "Ugandan discussions").

His practice had rightwing connections. With Carter-Ruck at the helm, the firm of Oswald Hickson Collier acted for the Conservative party and the likes of Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson.

In his memoirs he praised the rightwing financier Sir James Goldsmith for alleviating the injustice of the lack of legal aid with money from a foundation. He said it let solicitors assess cases in the same way as the Legal Aid Board would. However, the assessor was none other than Carter-Ruck, and his firm was paid, win or lose. The beneficiaries tended not to be widows and orphans but rightwing politicos such as Neil Hamilton, who trousered £20,000 from the BBC for a Panorama programme - Carter-Ruck's bill was £240,000.

The Goldsmith Foundation's other beneficiaries included Brian Crozier, a cold war enthusiast with intelligence links, and an official of the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers who sued Arthur Scargill.

Once described as the Margaret Thatcher of defamation law, Carter-Ruck was a conviction libel lawyer. If he acted for the plaintiff, he thought it the most outrageous libel; if for the defendant, the case should never have been bought. The common thread was to extract the maximum.

Carter-Ruck had one row after another with his partners. In 1977 they tried to boot him out and after four years' litigation were successful when he decamped to another part of the same building to form Peter Carter-Ruck & Partners. Within four years all his founding partners had left, including his daughter.

I left his firm in pure Carter-Ruck circumstances. Heinemann, for whom we acted, was publishing a book about the Ford family, by Robert Lacey. I was told by Carter-Ruck that there was no conflict in our advising. Lacey sent part of the book to Henry Ford for comment. Later I found Carter-Ruck advising Ford that the book was full of libel. He proved unable to give a truthful explanation.

Cases brought by Tudor Roberts, a solicitor, and the journalist Derek Jameson illustrate the Carter-Ruck techniques. In 1985 Roberts was awarded £20,000 damages against Private Eye plus costs on the higher scale. I agreed before I left Carter-Ruck's firm that he would only pay the costs recoverable from Private Eye. Carter-Ruck, however, billed Roberts £60,000. The cost judge allowed only £18,567. My assurance was ignored. Carter Ruck wanted the lot. It was two years before Roberts was reimbursed his damages and the legal costs he had earlier paid.

Derek Jameson, as a tabloid editor, had been unwisely advised to sue the BBC over a satirical sketch. Carter-Ruck said Jameson would get £25,000-£50,000. David Eady QC advised Carter-Ruck in writing that Jameson accept the £10 that the BBC had offered in settlement plus his costs. Carter-Ruck concealed this opinion from Jameson. Jameson lost the case and was sent a bill by Carter Ruck for £41,342.50. When he learned by chance of the QC's pessimistic advice, Carter-Ruck told him a string of lies.

· David Hooper is a media lawyer and was a partner of Peter Carter-Ruck