Defending the protection of sources, the British justice agreed on Tuesday a journalist whom the police were trying to force to reveal the identity of a terrorist responsible for one of the worst attacks committed in the United Kingdom.
Journalist Chris Mullin succeeded in preventing the West Midlands police from using anti-terrorism legislation to make him reveal who planted the bombs that destroyed two Birmingham pubs in 1974.
The attacks, attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), killed 21 people and injured dozens.
Mullin, a former Labour MP and former minister of Tony Blair's government, wrote a book that helped secure the release of six wrongly convicted men.
During the investigation, the real terrorist made him a “full confession”, he was established during a trial held in February in London. But the author promised never to reveal his identity.
In his sentence on Tuesday, Judge Mark Lucraft agreed to Mullin, backed by the British journalists' union NUJ.
The magistrate considered that there is no “public interest superior to the right of protection of the journalistic source” under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
“The right of a journalist to protect his sources is fundamental to a free press in a democracy,” said Mullin, 74, who had previously accused the police of not investigating properly.
If they had, he argued, “they could have caught the real authors in the first place.”
This sentence is “a milestone” for freedom of expression, said Mullin's lawyer Louis Charalambous.
“If a confidential source cannot trust a journalist's promise of lifetime protection, these investigations will never see the light of day,” he said.
For NUJ Secretary General Michelle Stanistreet, “this case threatened freedom of the press and represented another attempt to criminalize the legitimate actions of journalists.”
Wrongly convicted, the so-called “Birmingham Six” spent 17 years in prison and were released in 1991.
The West Midlands Police said they will “carefully study” this ruling, without specifying whether they contemplated an appeal.
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