Lawyer: News Corp sources row could go to court

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News International journalists might have a case to bring court action against their employer to stop it handing over confidential sources information to the police, a leading human rights lawyer has claimed.

Geoffrey Robertson QC, [who wrote a Times column yesterday [paywall]](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article3320316.ece) expressing concern about the actions of News Corp's management and standards committee, told BBC Radio 4's Media Show that the group's actions could be "very damaging".

He said News Corp's first duty was to its employees, not the Metropolitan police. His comments came after a Times reportclaimed journalists' sources were being compromised by the company handing documents to the police.

Robertson told the Media Show: "The problem is that it is the most fundamental tenet of journalism that every journalist worth his or her salt knows that you must not betray your sources.

"This is actually part of a European court judgment - a Europe-wide aspect of freedom of speech. Quite frankly if journalists could not keep their sources secret we would not get the amount of public interest news that we do get.

"Now they're typed into computers and the computers are the property of your employer, so the employer can breach the sources' confidence and hand it over to the police when there's no wrongdoing at all."

Asked if journalists or their sources might have a case for taking court action, Robertson replied: "There certainly might be."

He said News Corp did not have a legal duty to hand over the documents to police, adding: "This is idiotic. There is no duty on anyone to give information to the police.

"News Corp has a duty as an employer, before they hand over journalists for prosecution, to get in criminal experts to talk to the journalists, to make some investigation themselves."

Robertson said: "I think it has the potential to be very damaging because never before have you had a wholesale and apparently admitted handover of journalists' sources who have been promised anonymity and those promises have been destroyed by order of the journalists' employer."

The management and standards committee, tasked with co-operating with the police investigations into hacking and corrupt payments, has defended its work, insisting that documents are redacted and that sources are being protected.