Fighting for an editor facing five years' jail for protecting her sources

Roy Greenslade
10 Jun 2009

Tomorrow a judge will be asked to decide whether the police are right to demand that a journalist hand over her notes, phones and computers in order to discover how she obtains her stories. It is the latest in a sad saga of attempts by the authorities to cajole reporters into breaking journalism's most sacred obligation that confidential sources must be protected.

Will they never learn? All such attempts down the years to force journalists to speak - with one depressing exception, which I'll deal with in a moment - have ended in failure. Reporters are not police officers. They place information in the public domain for the wider public benefit. They cannot do that job if they break confidentiality agreements.

In some instances, and that is certainly true of this specific case, they would also be placing their lives in danger if they were to speak up. Suzanne Breen, a journalist who works in Northern Ireland, knows that all too well.

She has written a number of exclusive stories about the Real IRA, the dissident republican group responsible for murdering two British soldiers in March and for the Omagh bombing in 1998, which killed 29 people.

As she has said: "This is an organisation which sees people as collaborators for delivering pizzas. I don't know what they would make of a journalist who handed over all her materials to the police.

"I could remain in Northern Ireland and wait for a sledgehammer to come through my door, or I could enter a witness protection scheme and be unable to work as a journalist again."

Breen, northern editor of a Dublin-based newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, faces up to five years in jail if she fails to persuade a Belfast court tomorrow that she should not comply with the application made under the Terrorism Act by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Along with three other journalists -John Ware of the BBC's Panorama, Alex Thomson of Channel 4 and the Sunday Times's Liam Clarke - I have been asked to give evidence on her behalf.

It is, for all of us, a matter of principle. We do not believe journalists anywhere, and especially in a region as dangerous as Northern Ireland, should break a confidentiality agreement.

Thomson and Clarke have withstood similar applications in the past, so they have first-hand experience of what Breen is going through. There has been wider backing too. Some 5,000 people have signed a petition on her behalf, including a host of politicians and journalists, plus the Channel 4 presenter Jon Snow, Sky News managing editor Simon Cole, the actor Stephen Rea, novelist Roddy Doyle and singer Christy Moore.

So why is the PSNI pursuing the case? Do their senior officers' memories not stretch back to 1999 when they secured a court order against another Sunday Tribune journalist, Ed Moloney, that he hand over his notes of an interview with a man implicated in the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane.

Moloney looked to be heading for jail or facing a heavy fine until Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Carswell ruled that the original judge had been misguided to order Moloney to give up his notes to the police.

Or is it another case in 1999 that the police have in mind? This was one in which a young and inexperienced freelance journalist did succumb to pressure by handing over his notes and then going to so far as to act as a witness at the subsequent trial. Nick Martin-Clark gave a confidentiality agreement to a man serving an armed robbery charge in a Northern Ireland jail who clearly wished to confess to another crime.

It turned out that he admitted to having murdered a taxi driver. Martin-Clark then wrote a story about it for The Sunday Times, and the police immediately demanded that he help them to convict the man by handing over his tape-recordings. After some soul-searching, Martin-Clark did just that, going on to become a key prosecution witness.

His decision outraged journalists in Northern Ireland. He was swiftly expelled from the National Union of Journalists and, after a spell in a witness protection programme (because he evidently received death threats), he has never worked as a journalist since. It is the only case I have discovered of a British journalist giving up a source in such circumstances.

If reporters reveal the provenance of sensitive information given to them on the grounds of confidentiality, sources will dry up. If journalists decide on a case-by-case basis whether they will, or will not, identify a source then the essential trust between journalist and the public will disintegrate. You might be forgiven for thinking that Martin-Clark performed a virtuous public act by helping to convict a murderer. But that is short-term thinking.

Consider instead the fact that if journalists lose their credibility then stories with the potential to convict hundreds of criminals in future would never get published.

In the long run both journalism and society would suffer. Without sources, there would be no stories. And proper stories, let us not forget - especially at this time of the revelations about MPs' expenses - are revealed in the public interest. Without them, democracy itself would be imperilled.

We journalists have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not agents of the state, even if we regard our state as essentially benign and well-meaning. We are agents of the public. Our task in this overly secret society is already difficult enough without us being coerced into explaining how we obtain sensitive stories.

Too often, the police seek to use us as informers, which is wrong in principle and in practice. Their job is detection. Ours is exposure. These can be mutually beneficial, but when it comes to the crunch, journalists have a duty to keep their sources to themselves.