Two television journalists are to be cited for contempt to the High Court in Belfast because of their direct refusal yesterday to comply with an order by the Saville tribunal to identify their sources and hand in their notebooks.
After two days of legal submissions on the issue, the Channel 4 journalists, Mr Alex Thomson and Ms Lena Ferguson, were recalled to the witness stand and ordered directly by the tribunal chairman, Lord Saville, to comply with the request to identify four British soldiers who gave them information used in a series of programmes about Bloody Sunday.
Both declined, saying they had given an undertaking to the soldiers not to reveal their identity. Mr Thomson commented: "In order to do what you are suggesting, I would have to very publicly declare myself as a person who makes a promise, then breaks it - a person who ultimately cannot be trusted, both as a human being and as a journalist. That is an impossible position to be put in."
Mr Thomson, who presented the programmes in 1997 and 1998, said that the clear principle (of protecting sources) extended not only to Channel 4 News but to investigative journalism as a whole, "and if that principle needs to be defended by ultimately serving a prison sentence or whatever is required, then that is going to have to be done". ITN, as makers of Channel 4 News, was served with the witness summons to disclose various materials and sources, and after yesterday's proceedings a lawyer for the company said it will lodge an appeal. Mr Duncan Lamont said that ITN took the ruling very seriously, but it took the matter of protecting confidential sources equally seriously.
"Anonymity of sources is granted only on the rarest of occasions where ITN strongly believes that public interest can only be truly served if the identity of a source remains confidential," he said.
"Without that undertaking, certain information may never enter the public domain and serious investigative journalism would be impossible." ITN continued to give the two journalists full support, he added. Ms Ferguson, who is from Northern Ireland and is now editor of political programmes at the BBC in Belfast, told reporters outside the inquiry that she could not go back on the undertaking she gave to the soldiers.
"An agreement is an agreement, a promise is a promise, and that is all there is to it," she said.
Giving the tribunal's ruling, Lord Saville said that, on the details that had emerged, it was self-evident these soldiers had given accounts which it was vital for the inquiry to investigate fully, but which it could not do without knowing their identity.
He pointed out that, in a written ruling on the same matter in October 1999, the tribunal had concluded that disclosure of the soldiers' identity was necessary in the interests of justice, but it withheld making any order because it was thought the names might emerge by other means.
There now seemed to be no prospect of that happening. Moreover, material now disclosed showed that the soldiers in question had made statements to ITN "of potentially even greater importance than the tribunal appreciated in 1999".
Lord Saville stressed that the soldiers would still have the benefit of anonymity - their identities would be made known only to the inquiry and not to the public at large - and their evidence would be given in London.