National law council calls for review into suppression orders

The head of Australia's law council has called for a review into suppression orders to ensure they're consistent across the country and take into consideration the existence of the internet and social media.

Law Council of Australia president Arthur Moses said judges should do this by putting greater trust in juries to deal only with the facts before them in court, and by reminding journalists to stringently adhere to existing contempt of court rules.

A suppression order protected the Pell verdict from being known for months. Credit: Justin McManus

It was revealed on Tuesday that George Pell had been convicted of child sex abuse offences, a conviction handed down in the County Court in December last year, but a suppression order prevented that from being reported until a second matter involving Pell had been concluded. That second matter was dropped on Tuesday and thus Pell's initial conviction could be reported.

However many media outlets around the world published news of Pell's conviction in December while Australian media outlets were furious at being gagged as the verdict could be widely read on social media.

"It’s virtually impossible to quarantine juries from social media from the internet," Mr Moses told ABC's Radio National.

"We need to have legislation that bears in mind this fundamental truth. Otherwise, in effect, orders that are made by courts that don’t take that into account in effect place persons at risk of breaching orders and we need to be careful that legislation is fit for purpose.

"We need to look to why are we granting suppression orders in cases. It has to be necessary to prevent prejudice to the proper administration of justice and in many cases that can be done by giving a direction to a jury that they are to put out of their mind the fact that somebody has previously offended and focus on whether or not the individual is guilty of the offence they’ve been charged with.

"We also have contempt laws that prohibit the media from publishing material that has a real tendency to prejudice the conduct of a trial."

He said if he was the judge he would not have applied a suppression order to the Pell case.

Mr Moses said there was around 200 pieces of legislation from around Australia relating to suppression orders.

He said the bar for a suppression order to be applied was lower in Victoria than New South Wales for example, and that there should be nationally consistent laws.

"We think the time has come now for Australian Law Reform Commission to complete the job that the attorneys general in 2010 said they were going to do … to review and modernise Australian suppression laws and have standard set of laws. There’s no point having different laws in different states.

"We have to be realistic moving forward in relation to these orders. There’s no point having, in effect, legislation that dates back centuries in terms of relying on common law principles without focusing on the technology we have now."

Mr Moses also said he supported the recommendation from the royal commission into child sex abuse that there be a uniform law across Australia so priests no longer be exempt from mandatory child abuse reporting.