The judge who backed The Telegraph

Mr Justice Haddon-cave

The judge who found that there was a strong public interest in The Telegraph publishing allegations about a businessman’s behaviour towards employees has since been promoted to the Court of Appeal. Mr Justice Haddon-cave, who served as a High Court Judge from 2011, took up his Court of Appeal position earlier this month.

He has overseen some of the country’s most high profile terrorism trials, most recently sentencing Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, for a plot to murder Theresa May with a full-frontal assault on 10 Downing Street. Handing down a sentence of 30 years, the judge told Rahman he would have “plenty of time to study” the Koran in prison, where he would learn that Islam was a “religion of peace”. In March this year he sentenced Ahmed Hassan, 18, for a minimum of 34 years after he tried to bomb Parsons Green tube station in Sept 2017.

In the same month, the judge sentenced a religious teacher to a minimum of 25 years for training an “army of children” for terror attacks in London. Umar Ahmed Haque, 25, had shown Isil propaganda to 16 children at a mosque in Barking, London.

Since becoming a judge, Mr Justice Haddon-cave has also ruled on several cases regarding press freedom. In 2016, he dismissed a libel action against the BBC by Muslim imam, Shakeel Begg, who was suing the broadcaster after presenter Andrew Neil alleged on the Sunday Politics show that he had said jihad was the greatest of deeds. Throwing out the claim, Mr Justice Haddon-cave said the influential imam “clearly promotes and encourages violence in support of Islam and espouses a series of extremist Islamic positions.”

In 2017, the judge lifted reporting restrictions facing journalists during a particularly unpleasant rape trial where 17-year-old Charlie Pearce was accused of delivering several blows to a young female victim’s head with a concrete slab before raping her. Due to his age, Pearce received automatic anonymity at the start of his trial. But Mr Justice Haddon-cave lifted the restrictions after submissions from journalists on the “principle of open justice” and concluded it was “in the public interest” to remove the “substantial and unreasonable” reporting restrictions.

As a barrister, Mr Haddoncave represented all the victims of the Herald of Free Enterprise/ Zeebrugge disaster in 1987, the Marchioness disaster in 1989 and the Kegworth air crash in the same year.