Keeping secrets secret

 

The legal persecution of Julian Assange may well be the beginning of the general repression of investigative journalists and whistle-blowers if a national security bill presently being debated in Parliament is passed.

A person can be convicted under the new offence of “obtaining or disclosing protected information,” defined in Section 1 of National Security Bill 2022, faces a fine, life imprisonment, or both, if convicted following a jury trial. Those at risk of being prosecuted, will be any person who “copies,” “retains,” “discloses,” “distributes” or “provides access to” so-called protected information could be prosecuted. “Protected information” is defined as any “restricted material” and it need not even be classified.

Tim Dawson, a long-time member of the National Union of Journalists’ National Executive Council explained,  “The glaring omission at the heart of the National Security Bill is a straightforward public-interest defence..."

In theory, involvement of a “foreign power” must also be proven for Section 1 of the bill to apply. The foreign power condition could potentially be satisfied, therefore, due simply to the involvement, at any stage, of a journalist working for news outlets such as Al Jazeera, Press TV, CGTN, RT, Voice of America, France 24, or TeleSUr. Human rights group such as Reprieve, Privacy International, Transparency International have received some funding from other nations’ Governments and could therefore fall foul of this law. More disturbing, involvement of a foreign power is not actually needed if the government argues that the conduct of the defendant was intended to benefit a foreign power. In this circumstance, it is not necessary for the prosecution to identify a particular foreign power.

Section 2 of the bill also creates a crime of “obtaining or disclosing trade secrets”  which could include revealing, for example, corruption, environmental pollution, labour violations, human rights abuses or other forms of corporate malfeasance and could result in prosecution under this bill. 

Section 23 amends the Serious Crime Act 2007 to note that it can’t be used to prosecute members of MI5 (Security Service), MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service), GCHQ or the armed forces, for any criminal conduct committed outside the U.K,, if their criminal conduct is deemed “necessary for the proper function” of those institutions.

Taken from

UK Bill Threatens Journalists With Life in Prison – Consortium News