Australians with a modicum of curiosity might well ask what’s been going on.

Cardinal George Pell, an Australian who is one of the most senior people in the hierarchy of the Catholic church, was found guilty in December and no one till now has been allowed to know the details of the charges against him, the trial proceedings, the identity of the complainants, or his conviction.

It left a pretty big gap in the community’s knowledge of a serious event in the affairs of the nation.

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The county court in Melbourne ordered that any Pell-related criminal information be kept under wraps pending the outcome of a planned second trial on a number of separate charges. The notion was to protect prospective jurors at a second trial from having their thoughts contaminated and their views prejudiced by what happened at the first.

Now that we know there will be no second trial, the suppression order remaining in place against reporting the verdict on the first trial looks, to my mind and in this age of the ubiquitous internet, rather nonsensical.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Some of the big media outlets gave us a whiff that there was something in the public interest going on’

Indeed, suppression and non-publication orders from the courts increasingly take on a ludicrous quality, where locally based mainstream publishers and broadcasters with significant assets lie down and abide by judicial edicts, while those with one finger on a social media app blissfully ignore them.

One law for big publishers and no law for everyone else. It’s as though we are in Fantasia, where a large proportion of the population know something that they are not supposed to know.

Such was the case with Pell’s conviction. Some of the big media outlets in this country gave us a whiff that there was something in the public interest going on that could not be reported, with headlines like “Censored”, “Secret scandal” and so on.

Meanwhile, it became evident that the internet does not stop at the sovereign borders of the nation. Online publishers beyond the writ of the county court of Victoria were doing their level best to pump out the story. Among the notable reports were those by the Washington Post, the Daily Beast (which was published and then geo-blocked) and a US Jesuit news site.

The grapevine effect was up and running – so much for the holy writ of suppression orders.

Following the publication of those teasing headlines – after Pell’s conviction on the choirboy charges – there was a tense session in the county court in which the chief judge, Peter Kidd, and the director of public prosecutions, Kerri Judd QC, expressed their concern that the suppression order may have been breached – even without Pell being identified directly.

Since then the office of the Victorian DPP has notified media organisations, along with some of their senior editorial employees, that she is “considering charges” for sub-judice contempt and scandalising the court.

The Melbourne lawyer Justin Quill, from Macpherson Kelley, is acting for a combined group of media organisations who will defend the charges, including the Nine newspapers and TV outlets, News Corp, Channel Ten, Mamamia and Macquarie Media.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Increasingly, in common-law countries without constitutional free-speech protections, the law and the media clash.’ Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

As many as 100 editors, online content people and journalists are potentially in the frame.

Again, the contempt case against the media seems like a fantastical disconnect with events as they transpired. Ultimately, the second trial was not prejudiced because it didn’t take place and that was not due to any prejudicial reporting.

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The state of Victoria has a bit of a love affair with suppression orders, issuing them at more than twice the rate of New South Wales, which is a bigger jurisdiction with larger courts, more cases and more judges.

The statistics on this have been carefully collected by Gina McWilliams, senior legal counsel at News Corp in Sydney.

One ready explanation is that there is an ingrained knee-jerk response to applications for suppression or no-publication orders among Victoria’s judiciary, extending to saving people from “embarrassment”, or on grounds of poor health, or because it might make the job of the police simpler.

Many of these orders are a direct affront to open justice, freedom of the media and the community’s right to know what is happening in the courts and society generally. They are often-times made unaccompanied by adequate reasons and there is plenty of difficulty finding out if and when they have been lifted.

Freedom of speech is supposed to be an article of faith in a democracy, key components of which are the rule of law and an independent media. Americans, more than most, hold it in high regard because they have a constitution that protects reporting on matters of public importance. In fact, if the Pell trial were held in the US it would be unconstitutional to suppress reporting of the proceedings.

Increasingly, in common-law countries without constitutional free-speech protections, the law and the media clash. The “interests” of justice can be inimical to a free press.

Just before the 2016 criminal trial of Eddie Obeid, the NSW DPP asked the media to stop publishing the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s widely known findings about the disgraced former state minister. Further, it attached a spreadsheet of 1,800 online news articles about Obeid which it said should be taken down from internet archives.

In another Victorian case, the Securency banknote bribery trial of 2014, the supreme court, on an application from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under the Open Courts Act, suppressed the names of 17 leading political and government figures in the region. These included “any current or former prime minister of Malaysia”, the president of Vietnam and the president of Indonesia and his predecessor.

This was a super-injunction, whose very existence was suppressed, yet WikiLeaks believed the information important enough to publish, and was content to ignore the terms of the court’s order. It issued a press release via its Twitter account and the super-injunction was thereby rendered “futile”.

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The tech giants also appear to be significantly immune from the long arm of the courts. Last year Google breached a New Zealand court order suppressing publication of the name of the alleged accused in the murder of the English tourist Grace Millane.

And it it is not just the media nipping at the skirts of judges. Parliament on occasion has had the temerity to challenge the orders of the judiciary.

In the UK, parliament was the forum for the outing of English footballers who got the courts to keep their extramarital affairs out of the “red tops”. In the case of Sir Philip Green, the wealthy businessman who persuaded the master of the rolls to enforce non-disclosure agreements with several of his sexual harassment victims, it was Peter Hain who, in the House of Lords, put everyone out of their speculative misery by naming Green as the man who could not be named.

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While the rest of the world has moved on and embraced the internet and its copious supply of information, the courts are stuck in another place. Can the jury system exist alongside an internet where information flows freely? Can judges admit that the internet exists? Do injunctions have a sensible place in the internet age?

Short of getting rid of juries completely, jurors could be sequestered like mushrooms in a dark place without newspapers and the internet, while the rest of us get on with having access to important public interest information. The idea that the administration of justice should take precedence over society’s right to know is an idea whose time has run out.

To make orders significantly beyond the power of judicial enforcement in this country smacks of futility. And for courts to engage in acts of futility is an embarrassment.

