A super injunction is a UK court order that does two things at once: it prohibits publication of specific private information, and it prohibits anyone from revealing that the order itself exists. The second part is what makes it “super.” A standard privacy injunction is a matter of public record even when the underlying story is sealed, but a super injunction hides the proceedings, the parties, and the fact that a judge was ever involved.
How It Differs From an Ordinary Injunction
A regular injunction tells someone to stop doing something, usually publishing. Journalists can report that a court has blocked a story even when they cannot report the story itself. A super injunction removes that acknowledgment too.
A committee of senior UK judges chaired by Lord Neuberger defined the order as “an interim injunction which restrains a person from: (i) publishing information which concerns the applicant and is said to be confidential or private; and (ii) publicising or informing others of the existence of the order and the proceedings.”1Judiciary of the United Kingdom. Report of the Committee on Super-Injunctions
Between the two sits a narrower tool called an anonymised injunction, where the court acknowledges that an order exists but hides the names of the parties. A super injunction goes further and conceals the proceeding itself.
The Legal Basis in UK Law
Two rights brought into UK law through the European Convention on Human Rights sit on opposite sides of every super injunction application. Article 8 protects “the right to respect for private and family life.”2Equality and Human Rights Commission. Article 8 – Respect for Your Private and Family Life Article 10 protects “the right to freedom of expression,” including the right to “receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority.”3European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. European Convention on Human Rights – Article 10 Neither right is absolute, and judges have to decide which weighs more in a particular case.
Section 12 of the Human Rights Act 1998 pushes the balance toward speech. A court cannot grant an interim injunction unless the applicant is “likely to establish at trial that publication should not be allowed,” and it must weigh how much of the material is already public, whether there is a public interest in publication, and any relevant privacy code.4UK Supreme Court. PJS (Appellant) v News Group Newspapers Ltd (Respondent) – Press Summary
When public outcry about super injunctions peaked in 2011, the Neuberger Committee reported that the orders were in fact rare, often granted only as short-term measures to stop an opponent from being tipped off, and frequently set aside on appeal. The committee held that any departure from open justice had to be “strictly necessary in the interests of justice,” go “no further than is strictly necessary,” and be “supported by clear and cogent evidence.”1Judiciary of the United Kingdom. Report of the Committee on Super-Injunctions
How Someone Obtains One
Applying is demanding and expensive. The applicant files evidence through a witness statement or affidavit, with all relevant documents attached. In urgent cases the application can be made without notice to the other side; when that happens, the applicant carries a strict duty to present the full picture, including facts they should have discovered through reasonable investigation, and any order granted that way lasts only a few days until both sides can be heard.
The financial barrier does much of the gatekeeping. Legal fees to obtain a super injunction have been estimated at roughly £50,000 to £60,000 or more, with the court filing fee negligible by comparison. Challenging an existing order also costs significant money, and defendants may not be in a position to fund that fight.
What the Order Prohibits
The scope is deliberately wide. It covers the protected information itself, any detail that could identify the people involved, and any reference to the existence of the order or the proceedings behind it. The prohibition reaches every medium: newspapers, television, radio, websites, and social media.
Jigsaw Identification
Courts also watch for jigsaw identification, where separate pieces of apparently harmless information can be combined to reveal a protected party. A news item might give an unnamed figure’s profession and neighborhood while a social post adds the same profession and a specific gym; together, they point to one person. The test is whether publication of a particular detail is “likely to lead to” identification, even when the detail looks innocuous on its own. Judges have been cautioned, though, against stretching this concern into “a blanket prohibition on disclosure of any piece of the jigsaw.”
What Happens if Someone Breaches It
A breach is contempt of court. Under UK Civil Procedure Rules, a court finding someone in contempt can impose imprisonment, a fine, confiscation of assets, or other lawful punishment.5UK Ministry of Justice. Part 81 – Applications and Proceedings in Relation to Contempt of Court The maximum prison term under the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is two years.6Courts and Tribunals Judiciary. Chapter 10 – Contempt of Court
Companies face the same exposure. If a corporate body breaches the order, its directors and officers can individually be held in contempt, and the penal notice on the front of every injunction spells that out.
Cases That Shaped the Law
A handful of cases show how super injunctions work in practice and where they tend to fail.
Trafigura and Parliamentary Privilege
In October 2009 the oil trading company Trafigura obtained a super injunction broad enough to stop The Guardian from reporting a written parliamentary question tabled by MP Paul Farrelly. The paper responded by publishing a story saying only that it had been prohibited from reporting on a parliamentary question. The public reaction exposed a constitutional limit: Article IX of the Bill of Rights 1688 provides that “the Freedom of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parliament.”7UK Parliament. Chapter 6 – Parliamentary Privilege and Injunctions No court order can stop a member of Parliament from speaking in parliamentary proceedings, and repeating that speech is not contempt.
The Ryan Giggs Twitter Episode
In 2011 a footballer identified in court papers only as “CTB” obtained a super injunction over an extramarital affair. A Twitter user began posting the names of celebrities said to be protected by such orders, and tens of thousands of users quickly repeated them. UK media could not name the footballer, but international outlets identified him as Ryan Giggs. His legal team sued Twitter to unmask the anonymous users, which produced more publicity still. As a US company, Twitter was likely shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The case became the standard example of how social media can turn a super injunction into the opposite of what it was meant to achieve.
PJS v News Group Newspapers
In 2016 the UK Supreme Court maintained a privacy injunction for a public figure identified only as “PJS,” even though the information had already been widely published by American and international media online. The Court distinguished privacy from confidentiality: the information may no longer have been confidential in practice, but publication in mainstream UK media would still cause a “qualitative difference in intrusiveness and distress” compared with scattered online coverage. The majority held that PJS was likely to obtain a permanent injunction at trial and that no countervailing public interest justified lifting the interim order.4UK Supreme Court. PJS (Appellant) v News Group Newspapers Ltd (Respondent) – Press Summary
The Afghan Data Breach
Not every super injunction involves celebrity gossip. In 2023 a judge granted one after the UK Ministry of Defence accidentally compromised a dataset holding the identities of tens of thousands of Afghans who had assisted the British government, along with some UK intelligence personnel. The court found that if the Taliban learned of the breach they could take steps to acquire the data, putting lives at risk. The government had asked only for a standard injunction; the judge imposed the stricter order on his own initiative because even revealing that a breach had occurred could endanger people in the dataset. The order was lifted in 2025, which is when the public first learned of it.
Why the Same Order Would Not Work in the United States
Super injunctions in the UK sense are essentially impossible under American constitutional law. The barrier is the First Amendment’s prohibition on prior restraint, enforced by the Supreme Court since its 1931 decision in Near v. Minnesota. The Court described pre-publication court orders as “the essence of censorship” and said “the chief purpose of the guaranty is to prevent previous restraints upon publication.”8Justia. Near v. Minnesota – 283 US 697 (1931)
Any court order suppressing speech before publication carries “a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.”9Justia. The Doctrine of Prior Restraint A super injunction would combine that suppression with secrecy, compounding the constitutional problem. American courts generally hold that the remedy for harmful speech is a lawsuit after publication, not a gag order before it.
Attempting to enforce a UK super injunction in a US court faces a further statutory wall. The federal SPEECH Act prevents American courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign defamation judgments unless the foreign law provided at least as much protection for speech as the First Amendment would, with the party seeking enforcement carrying the burden.10Congress.gov. Public Law 111-223 – Securing the Protection of Our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act The statute is written around defamation, but it reflects a broader American resistance to foreign orders that restrict speech in ways the First Amendment would not allow.
The Access-to-Justice Problem
The most persistent criticism is that super injunctions create a two-tier system. When the legal fees run into tens of thousands of pounds, the protection is effectively available only to the wealthy, and the orders overwhelmingly benefit well-known public figures suppressing embarrassing personal information. Ordinary people facing comparable privacy violations cannot afford the same remedy.
Press freedom advocates add that these orders can bury information the public has a legitimate interest in knowing. A public figure who has cultivated a particular image may have a weaker privacy claim than they think, because courts do weigh the public interest in exposing hypocrisy. The secrecy of the process means the public never gets to assess whether the court struck the right balance, because they never learn the balancing happened.
The practical check on overuse may be built into the orders themselves. When a super injunction works, nobody hears about it. When it fails, the publicity is usually worse than whatever the applicant was trying to hide.