THE Examiner is to join other newspapers and RTE in appealing a High Court judgment which upheld the decision of a Cork judge to ban daily reporting of a major drugs trial at Cork Circuit Court.
The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and RTE are also to appeal to the Supreme Court, and possibly even to the European Court of Human Rights.
The case in Cork involved the seizure of cocaine worth £47 million. Judge Anthony Murphy banned contemporaneous reporting of the case. The case this week at the High Court was to test whether Judge Murphy had the right to make such an order.
Mr Justice Morris found last Tuesday that he did have that right and that the judge had balanced the right of the accused to a fair trial against the right to freedom of information and in doing so found that the accused's right to a fair trial was paramount and ranked higher in the hierarchy of constitutional rights than the right of the media to report on a daily basis.
The media fear that while there are certain exceptions to the principle that justice be administered in public, such as matters involving minors, family law or protecting the young or vulnerable, the effect of the High Court judgment is to create another category of cases which may not be reported where a judge believes day today reporting may prejudice the right of the accused to a fair trial.
A spokesman for the National Newspapers of Ireland, the representative body for the national newspaper industry, said that NNI would stand behind the record of Irish journalists and would argue that any infringement of the media's right to report matters of public interest had to be resisted.