19/09/2019
HCMP2801/2015 THE UNIVERSITY
62.
OF HONG KONG v. HONG
KONG
COMMERCIAL
BROADCASTING
CO LTD AND ANOTHER
I am highly conscious of the dimension of free speech in the present
case, but there is nothing
in the authorities to show that the traditional
approach suitably adjusted and applied would necessarily fail to give due
recognition and effect to any fundamental rights.
63.
In Attorney General v Guardian Newspapers Ltd, at the interlocutory
stage of the famous Spycatcher case, the Court of Appeal
FSR
3,
18)
applying
the American
Cyanmid
approach,
injunction which had been continued by Millett J.
complaint
brought
infringed,
inter alia,
by
the
article
newspapers
10
of the
(see [1989] 2
maintained
Subsequently,
that the
interlocutory
European
Convention
Rights, in which it was submitted that the American
an
in the
injunction
on
Human
Cyanmid principles
were unduly advantageous to a plaintiff seeking to restrain disclosure, the
European
abstracto,
Court of Human
proceeding
Rights declined to review those principles in
instead
to
determine
“whether
the
interference
resulting from their application was necessary having regard to the facts and
circumstances prevailing in the specific case before it”: The Observer and
The Guardian v United Kingdom (1991) 14 EHRR
153, 193.
In the result
the European Court held that there was no infringement of article 10 arising
from the interim injunction granted between the period from July 1986 to
July 1987 (ie the period prior to the publication of the book in the United
States), noting:
“In any event, ... the English courts did far more than simply apply the
American Cyanmid principles inflexibly or automatically; they recognised
that the present case involved a conflict between the public interest in
preventing and the public interest in allowing disclosure of the material in
question, which conflict they resolved by a careful weighing of the relevant
considerations on either side.”
https: //legalref.judiciary.hk/Irs/common/ju/ju_frame.jsp? DIS=101619&currpage=T
21/33