Thomas Hughes, Executive Director of ARTICLE 19 said in response to use of Regulation of Investigatory (RIPA) Powers Act to identify journalist sources:
“The role of the media is to hold those in power to account, and in order to do so they must be able to protect the anonymity of their sources. However RIPA legislation undermines this protection, by giving security services and other bodies, the means and power to identify them.
“The courts in Britain and in Europe have consistently found that protection of journalists sources is essential to freedom of speech. RIPA is being used as a means of bypassing those protections. The loophole should be closed so that any attempts to obtain phone records from a journalist or disclose a source’s identity should be exercised exclusively by courts of law before it happens, not just reviewed by a bureaucrat a year later, if ever.”