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The Press Gazette reports that permission has been granted to allow the appeal by Steven Sugar against the Court of Appeal’s refusal to overturn the first instance decision by Mr Justice Irwin that the Balen Report was exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 because the corporation held it for “purposes of journalism, art or literature”.
The report is an internal report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, prepared by senior news editor Malcolm Balen.
In January 2005, Sugar requested a copy of the report, starting litigation that led to the case going all the way to the House of Lords on a question of jurisdiction before returning to the Information Tribunal, the decision of which was overturned by Mr Justice Irwin.
The Court of Appeal upheld that decision in a judgment (Sugar v BBC & Anor [2010] EWCA Civ 715) on 23 June this year.
The Master of the Rolls said in that decision that he accepted the BBC’s argument that once it was established that the information sought was held by the corporation for the purposes of journalism, it was effectively exempt from production under the Act, even if it was also being held for other purposes.
3 comments
David Guy said:
09/11/2010 at 22:13
Given that the BBC’s major raison d’etre can loosely be described as ‘journalism, art or literature’ the exemption from disclosure effectively shields the BBC from the Freedom of Information Act.
Andy said:
10/11/2010 at 13:41
The BBC has no right to cling on to this.
The licence fee payer have effectively paid for it, so they have every right to read it. Otherwise don’t have a licence fee! Same goes for practically every other publically-funded institution, excepting perhaps those dealing with personal or national security.
Nomi Benari said:
13/11/2010 at 11:35
The Balen Report was undertaken mainly because many Jewish activists conplained about the BBC’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We were asked to submit evidence, which many of us did. If this evidence was used in the report, then we should have a right to see the report. And if it was not, then we have the right to know this and to ask why it was not used.