Judge: Why I threw out Doncaster Council's 'no publicity' plea

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On Monday, Mr Justice Tugendhat dismissed an application by Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council for the continuation of an injunction which it had obtained four days earlier.

It prevented the BBC from broadcasting on Newsnight any information from a serious case review (SCR), or its summary, about the circumstances leading to the committal of the offences.

The council told the judge at London's High Court that the programme transcript referred to two pieces of "confidential information" - that the brothers were placed with elderly foster parents and that one of them was excluded from school in March 2006 after he threatened staff with a baseball bat.

Doncaster accepted that both passages were minor matters but said it was concerned that if the BBC was proposing to publish these items, there was an implied threat that it would publish other confidential information.

The BBC's QC, Desmond Browne, said the inference to be drawn was to the contrary.

He said it was clear that if that was all the BBC was intending to use, it was to be inferred that it had decided not to publish other information which was or might be confidential.

In any event, said Mr Browne, if Doncaster asked the BBC, in the usual manner, the BBC would respond constructively, and there was no evidence from any individual that private information was threatened with misuse.

The judge said the application for the injunction must fail because there was no evidence before the court that there was or had been a threat by the BBC to publish confidential or private information.

"There may well be confidential information in the SCR, but if there is, the fact that the BBC has had access to it is not a sufficient basis for granting an injunction against the BBC."

He added: "The fact that I have refused to grant an injunction against the BBC does not mean that anyone else is free to publish any confidential information that there may be.

"But an application for an injunction must identify both the information said to be confidential or private, and the evidence of a threat to publish."