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Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, has rejected a collective complaint from ten pro-Brexit politicians that BBC coverage had breached the rules of due impartiality in the Communications Act and in the Broadcasting Code. The complaints concerned sets of broadcasts on BBC Radio Four. These were: coverage of the fifth round of Brexit negotiations in the flagship ‘Today’ programme; Series 3 of ‘Brexit: A Guide for the Perplexed’; and a special day of broadcasts on ‘Britain at the Crossroads’. They were broadcast between 9 October 2017 and 29 March 2018. The complainants claimed that pro-Brexit...

On 28 January 2019 the High Court of Justice in England ruled that cockpit footage from the Shoreham Airshow crash cannot be released to the press, after it had been played to a jury. The background to this trial began on 22 August 2015, when a Hawker Hunter fighter jet crashed during a display at the Shoreham Airshow at Shoreham Airport, England, after failing to complete an aerobatic manoeuvre. Eleven people died in the resulting fireball. In 2018 former Royal Air Force pilot Andy Hill was charged with eleven counts of manslaughter by gross negligence and one count of endangering an aircraft....

On 7 March 2019, the European Commission adopted a decision accepting commitments made by a number of well-known film studios and the broadcaster Sky UK to address the Commission’s concerns regarding clauses in the studios' licensing contracts for pay-TV with Sky UK. The film studios are Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros., and according to the Commission, the clauses at issue “prevented Sky UK from allowing EU consumers outside the United Kingdom and Ireland to subscribe to Sky UK's pay-TV services to access films via satellite or online”, and also required NBCUniversal, Sony...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has delivered a judgment on the compatibility of the right to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with the collection, retention and further use of personal data for purposes of police intelligence, while two earlier cases reported in IRIS on the bulk interception of personal communications for intelligence purposes and the right to privacy are pending before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (Centrum för Rättvisa v. Sweden, IRIS 2018-8/3, and Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United...

In a referendum on 23 June 2016, 51.89% of UK voters decided that their country should leave the European Union. The precise conditions of the United Kingdom’s departure are still being negotiated. Only recently - on 15 January 2019 - did the British Parliament reject the Brexit agreement that Prime Minister Theresa May had negotiated with the European Union by 432 votes to 202. Fears of a ‘no deal’ or ‘hard’ Brexit without an agreement to govern the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom are therefore growing. A ‘hard Brexit’ would have a significant impact on the...