Contempt of court is one of the oldest and most sweeping powers available to the English and Welsh judiciary. Broadly defined as any conduct that interferes with, obstructs, or undermines the administration of justice, it encompasses a remarkably diverse range of behaviours — from the publication of prejudicial material about a defendant during an active criminal trial, to the wilful breach of a court injunction, to disruptive conduct within the courtroom itself. The legal consequences can be severe: imprisonment, unlimited fines, and the sequestration of assets. More than 100 people are committed to prison for contempt each year in England and Wales alone (New Law Journal, 2025). Yet the Law Commission — the UK’s statutory independent law reform body — concluded in November 2025, following a three-year review, that in some cases the current law of contempt may constitute a violation of the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Law Gazette, 2025). The question of whether the contempt of court charge is ethical is therefore not merely philosophical — it is legally urgent.
The Case for Contempt: Why the Power Exists
The ethical justification for contempt of court law rests on a foundational principle that few would openly contest: that the rule of law requires effective enforcement mechanisms, and that without them, judicial authority becomes hollow and ultimately meaningless. Courts exist to resolve disputes, protect rights, and administer justice on behalf of society. If individuals, organisations, or media entities can defy court orders, publish material that prejudices juries, or intimidate witnesses without legal consequence, the entire system of justice becomes structurally vulnerable to those with sufficient resources, platforms, or disregard for legal process to exploit that vulnerability (Law Commission, 2025).
In this framework, contempt of court is not the enemy of liberty — it is one of its guardians. The right to a fair trial, protected under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, cannot be operationally secured without some mechanism for preventing media prejudice, witness interference, and the open defiance of judicial orders (Press Gazette, 2025). From this perspective, the ethical legitimacy of contempt is grounded in its service to a competing and equally fundamental right: the right of defendants and claimants alike to have their cases decided on evidence and argument rather than on public prejudice, media pressure, or the defiance of those with power to ignore court orders.
The Ethical Critique: Fragmentation, Overreach, and Chilling Effects x
The ethical case against contempt of court — as currently constituted in English and Welsh law — is substantially more complex and considerably more troubling than its defenders typically acknowledge. The Law Commission’s 2025 report identified the law as “beset by some significant problems,” characterised by a lack of coherence, consistency, and clarity that renders it unpredictable in application and capable of producing outcomes that are disproportionate to the conduct it is ostensibly designed to address (Law Commission Summary, 2025). Section 12 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, which governs contempt in magistrates’ courts, operates entirely without judicial scrutiny of whether the conduct in question actually caused harm — a procedural deficit that raises immediate questions of proportionality and due process.
The tension between contempt law and freedom of expression has become particularly acute in the digital era. The United States Department of State’s 2024 Human Rights Report on the United Kingdom identified UK contempt of court laws as among the significant restrictions on freedom of expression during the year, noting that they had forced US magazine The New Yorker to geoblock British subscribers from reading an article about an ongoing court case — an extraterritorial chilling effect on journalism that the 1981 legislative framework was never designed to contemplate (US Department of State, 2025). Press Gazette’s legal analysis, drawing on the Law Commission’s consultation, concluded that the current UK framework sets too high a threshold in the digital arena, with coverage of active proceedings that is “imprecise and operationally, ends up being over restrictive in some ways and ineffective in others” — a formulation that captures the ethical paradox of a law that simultaneously over-punishes and under-achieves its stated purpose (Press Gazette, 2025).
Contempt and Civil Liberties: The Misinformation Paradox
One of the most ethically significant and practically consequential critiques of the current contempt framework emerged directly from the Southport murders of July 2024 and the disorder that followed. The Law Commission concluded that contempt of court laws had played a direct role in the crisis: by constraining what information public authorities could disclose about the suspect, contempt law created an information vacuum into which misinformation, disinformation, and counter-narratives — including false claims about the attacker’s identity and immigration status — spread unchecked across social media, contributing materially to the subsequent riots (Law Gazette, 2025).
This finding inverts the traditional ethical justification for contempt with disturbing precision. A law designed to protect the integrity of justice proceedings had instead — through its information-suppressive effect — produced conditions that fuelled public disorder, racial violence, and the spread of demonstrably false information at scale. The ethical question this poses is not whether contempt serves a legitimate purpose in principle — it clearly does — but whether its current architecture is fit for a media environment in which the absence of accurate information is as socially dangerous as its distortion (Law Commission, 2024).
The Article 10 Problem: When Contempt Silences the Press
The relationship between contempt of court and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights — which protects the right to freedom of expression, including for the press — sits at the heart of the ethical debate. Academic research published in the peer-reviewed journal Journalism Practice in 2025 found that freedom of the press in the UK has faced a measurable deterioration over the past decade, with contempt laws — alongside defamation actions and privacy injunctions — identified as among the primary legal mechanisms through which judicial discourse has progressively shifted from protecting journalistic freedom to emphasising journalistic responsibility and restricting publication (Journalism Practice, 2025). The Law Commission’s conclusion that the current law “does not enable individuals to regulate or foresee the consequences of their conduct” is a fundamental legal principle violation (i.e. a de jure fault) — legality requires that citizens be able to anticipate when their actions will attract criminal liability, and an unpredictable contempt law fails that test and thereby compromises the rule of law it claims to serve (Law Gazette, 2025).
4 New Square Chambers’ analysis of specific civil contempt proceedings further identified that the privilege against self-incrimination in civil courts creates confusion that disadvantages defendants in ways that have no principled ethical basis — and that the current absence of any mechanism to account for a defendant’s means when assessing costs in contempt proceedings raises proportionality concerns of direct relevance under Article 10(2) ECHR (4 New Square Chambers, 2024).
Toward an Ethical Framework for Reform
The Law Commission’s November 2025 report proposed a restructured contempt framework built on four clearly defined categories: general contempt, contempt by breach of court order or undertaking, contempt by publication, and contempt by disrupting proceedings. It further recommended that all contempt proceedings be made subject to judicial review, and that the Attorney General’s decisions to bring contempt cases in the public interest — previously unreviewable — be rendered accountable through that mechanism (Law Commission, 2025). These reforms, if enacted, would substantially address the coherence and proportionality deficits that have accumulated in the law since 1981. The call from Press Gazette and allied press freedom advocates for a public interest defence in contempt by publication cases would further close the gap between the law as it operates and the ethical principles it ought to embody (Press Gazette, 2025).
Conclusion
The contempt of court charge is not inherently unethical — it serves genuine and indispensable functions in protecting the right to a fair trial and the integrity of judicial authority. But in its current form in England and Wales, as the Law Commission, the US State Department, academic press freedom researchers, and legal practitioners have each independently concluded, it is ethically compromised: by its incoherence, its unpredictability, its chilling effect on journalism, its potential to amplify the very harms it is designed to prevent, and — most seriously — its probable incompatibility with the Article 10 right to freedom of expression. The ethical question is not whether contempt should exist, but whether it should continue to exist in a form that the law’s own reform body now acknowledges may violate human rights. The answer, plainly, is no.
References
4 New Square Chambers (2024) ‘What’s gone wrong with the law of contempt?’, 22 July. Available at: https://www.4newsquare.com/whats-gone-wrong-with-the-law-of-contempt/ (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
Journalism Practice (2025) ‘Threats to media freedom in the United Kingdom’, Journalism Practice. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17577632.2025.2530854 (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
Law Commission (2024) Contempt of Court: Consultation Paper No 262. London: Law Commission. Available at: https://cdn.websitebuilder.service.justice.gov.uk/uploads/sites/54/2025/01/Contempt-of-Court-Consultation-Paper-9-July-2024-Web-1.pdf (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
Law Commission (2025) Contempt of Court: Report (Part 1) on Liability. London: Law Commission. Available at: https://cdn.websitebuilder.service.justice.gov.uk/uploads/sites/54/2025/11/2025-11-14-Contempt-of-Court-Report-Part-1-on-Liability-2CMD.pdf (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
Law Commission (2025) Contempt of Court: Report (Part 1) Summary. London: Law Commission. Available at: https://cdn.websitebuilder.service.justice.gov.uk/uploads/sites/54/2025/11/Contempt-of-Court-P1-Summary-Nov-25.pdf (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
Law Gazette (2025) ‘Contempt laws violate freedom of expression — Law Commission’, Law Gazette, 18 November. Available at: https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/contempt-laws-violate-freedom-of-expression-law-commission/5125144.article (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
New Law Journal (2025) ‘Clarity sought on contempt of court’, New Law Journal. Available at: https://www.newlawjournal.co.uk/content/clarity-sought-on-contempt-of-court (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
Press Gazette (2025) ‘Why UK’s contempt of court laws need reform for digital age’, Press Gazette. Available at: https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/why-uks-contempt-of-court-laws-need-reform-for-digital-age/ (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
US Department of State (2025) 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: United Kingdom. Washington DC: US State Department. Available at: https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/united-kingdom (Accessed: 10 August 2026).
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