The Media and the UK Supreme Court

Abstract

The Supreme Court is understandably pleased with the “close relationship with media organisations”1 that its five-person communications team has built up over the past couple of years. In the Court’s annual report for 2010/11, it describes two television documentaries broadcast on minority channels as the “highlight of this year”.2 These programmes apparently went down well with members of the public who contacted Court staff after transmission—though neither generated any particular news coverage. But that is hardly a novelty; there has been very little coverage of the Court in its first two years or so. Though many of its rulings have been reported in the press and some have even made their way onto the television bulletins, it has not yet been asked to decide the sort of ‘right-to-life’ case that might attract wide public attention. There is little interest in newly-appointed judges. For all the visitors who pop in to use the only free toilets on Parliament Square, the Court remains largely unknown to the British public. Perhaps that explains why it seized on the Julian Assange case quite so enthusiastically, declaring in December 2011 that theWikileaks founder would not only be granted permission to appeal against extradition but also that his case would be heard little more than a month later by seven justices instead of the normal five, “given the great public importance of the issue raised”.3 That issue—which had never struck the law lords as of any importance before—was whether a state could designate a prosecutor as a “judicial authority” within the meaning of the Extradition Act 2003. It would certainly be of great public importance if the Supreme Court were now to tell states that they could not. But what should we read into the decision to assemble a panel of