The award-winning Guardian and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr will appeal against a ruling that ordered her to pay significant legal costs to the prominent Brexit backer Arron Banks.
The appeal court ruling last week was widely criticised by news outlets, press freedom organisations and prominent international journalists including the Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa.
They warned that the decision to make Cadwalladr responsible for hundreds of thousands of pounds of Banks’ legal costs risked stifling public interest journalism in the UK.
Cadwalladr said that following a meeting with her legal team, she had decided to appeal against the ruling, because it set a “chilling precedent for UK journalism”.
“Even if you fight for years and successfully establish that your journalism was in the public interest, you can still face crippling costs,” she said, in an update to her crowd-funding appeal to cover legal costs.
“I will seek permission from the court of appeal to appeal to the supreme court, or if that fails, we can apply for permission from the supreme court. And if that fails, we believe we have a strong case to take it before the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.”
Banks, who donated a record £8m to the pro-Brexit Leave.EU campaign group, sued over comments made by Cadwalladr in a TED talk and a tweet in 2019. He originally lost his case.
Mrs Justice Steyn found Cadwalladr’s remarks were protected at the time she made them, because they were part of reporting on a matter of “real and abiding public interest” and she found that her belief that publishing those remarks was in the public interest was a reasonable one for her to hold.
The judge also ruled that the public interest defence fell away from April 2020, when the Electoral Commission issued a statement confirming it accepted an earlier National Crime Agency conclusion that there was no evidence that Banks had broken the law. But she found Banks had not suffered serious harm as a result of the continuing publication.
Banks then went to the court of appeal, which partially ruled in his favour, concluding serious harm had been caused by the continuing publication of the words complained of in the TED talk after April 2020.
It did not overturn the public interest defence of the original reporting, which the appeal court recognised “absorbed most of the time and money”. The parties later agreed that Cadwalladr should pay £35,000 in damages for the continued publication.
However, the costs ruling required Cadwalladr to cover 60% of Banks’s legal bills for the original case, repay some money he had been ordered to pay her in respects of her costs for the original hearing, and pay one--third of his legal costs for the appeal. That amounts to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Guardian News and Media, the global news organisation that publishes the Observer and Guardian, criticised the ruling as setting a “chilling precedent” that “has the potential to stifle freedom of expression in this country”.
Broad international support came from global media freedom organisations ranging from PEN international, RSF and the Committee to Protect Journalists to the NUJ, as well as prominent colleagues including Ressa.
“We’re with you, Carole Cadwalladr,” she said on Twitter after the costs ruling was announced. “Dear UK, how will you hold power to account if journalists are penalised for doing the right thing?”
Banks said: “In my opinion, this case is being driven by Carol Cadwalladr’s lawyers, who banked the win. RPC were criticised in a recent court statement over the use of partial conditional fee arrangements. She is a hostage to a desperate last throw of RPC legal dice.”
