Budu v The British Broadcasting Corporation

In an online libel claim, archived articles must be assessed in the context in which a realistic reader would encounter them. Where linked articles contain detailed, uncontradicted denials, they may substantially dilute an earlier allegation. A publication is incapable of bearing an implausibly aggravated meaning where its evident subject is materially different, such as immigration status rather than security risk.

An original publisher is not liable for a search-engine snippet which extracts words and creates a defamatory allegation absent from the underlying article. A secondary publication must at least repeat the whole or part of the original libel’s sting. A claim based on many-years-old archived internet material may be struck out where the remaining meaning is plainly true, the evidence of publication and damage is speculative, and delay has materially prejudiced the defendant’s ability to defend the claim.

The claimant sued the BBC for libel concerning three 2004 articles archived on its website and a Google search-result snippet. The articles concerned the withdrawal of a police job offer after inquiries into the claimant’s immigration status. The claimant alleged that the first article identified him as an illegal immigrant and that the second and third articles suggested that he posed a security risk.

The BBC applied under CPR 3.4(2) and CPR 24.2 to strike out the claim or obtain summary judgment. The applications concerned meaning, publication, reference, republication, truth and abuse of process. The central questions were whether the archived articles were capable of bearing the pleaded meanings and whether the residual claim should proceed.

1. Publication and reference. The first article was not realistically accessible after May 2008 through a search using the claimant’s name except by first accessing the second or third article. The claimant therefore had no realistic prospect of proving that a reader encountered the first article alone and understood it to refer to him. Any such reader would ordinarily read the linked articles, so the first article had to be assessed in that context ([31]-[44]).
2. Meaning. Applying the principles in Gillick v BBC, Jeynes v News Magazine Ltd, Jameel v Wall Street Journal Europe and Berezovsky v Forbes Inc, the court was required to consider the range of meanings a representative reasonable reader could sensibly attribute to the words, allowing for context and the imprecision of language. Read together, the articles were incapable of bearing either the pleaded level-one meaning or the proposed reasonable-grounds-to-suspect meaning that the claimant was an illegal immigrant. Their proper effect was, at most, to raise unresolved questions about his immigration history and future status, which he might not have fully disclosed to the police ([45]-[53]).
3. The second and third articles were incapable of bearing the pleaded security-risk meaning. Security vetting was presented as the means by which immigration-status issues emerged, not as evidence that the claimant was a security risk. It would be perverse to equate immigration irregularity with security risk ([54]-[58]).
4. Google snippet. Under the republication principles discussed in McManus v Beckham, a secondary publication must at least repeat the whole or part of the original libel’s sting. The snippet extracted words from the second article but, divorced from context, attributed an allegation which the article itself was incapable of bearing. The BBC therefore could not be liable for the snippet. The court also rejected the suggestion that liability could arise merely because another possible publisher, such as a search engine, might not be liable ([59]-[77]).
5. Residual claim and abuse. The only potentially arguable claim concerned the lower meaning that there were unresolved questions about the claimant’s immigration status which he might not have fully disclosed. On the agreed facts, that meaning was unquestionably true. The claimant’s delay, the loss of the journalist’s contemporaneous notes, the speculative evidence of publication and damage, the limited significance of the residual meaning, and the resulting prejudice to the BBC made continuation disproportionate. Applying Jameel (Yousef) v Dow Jones Co Inc, continuation would be an abuse of process and would interfere disproportionately with the BBC’s rights under article 10 of the Convention ([93]-[128]).
6. The claim was struck out.