[1][2] Gag orders are sometimes used in an attempt to assure a fair trial by preventing prejudicial pre-trial publicity, although their use for this purpose is controversial since they are a potentially unconstitutional prior restraint that can lead to the press's using less reliable sources such as off-the-record statements and second- or third-hand accounts.
[4] In the summer of 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the existence of an Australia-wide gagging order, issued 19 June by the Supreme Court of Victoria, to block reporting of bribery allegations involving several international political leaders in the region.
[6][7][8][9] In early February 2019, Victoria's DPP, Kerri Judd QC, wrote to around 50 Australian news publishers, editors, broadcasters, reporters and subeditors, accusing them of breaking the gag order.
[12] In late 2009, Israel issued a gag order against the Israeli media reporting on facts surrounding the Anat Kamm–Uri Blau affair.
[14] On 13 November 2013 a gag order concerning a famous Israeli singer suspected of sex with girls below the age of consent was issued.
[16] The Associated Press speculated that a statement made by Khaled Mashal the previous day, in which he spoke of an Israeli request through a European intermediary for the release of "two soldiers and two bodies", may have "forced Israel's hand".
[18] In August 2017, Israeli court issued a month-old gag order on a state witness deal regarding the ongoing criminal investigations of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
[34] Critics point to the legislation being used to protect the identities of well-known figures when they are accused of crime,[35][36] and that suppressing details from publication conflicts with the principle of open justice.
[36] The New Zealand Bar Association has defended name suppression laws as an important tool for balancing the principles of open justice against fair trial rights.
[38] After unsuccessfully calling for the gag order's withdrawal, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) and the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (PTCIJ) filed a lawsuit against President Muhammadu Buhari and Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed, with National Broadcasting Commission also named as a defendant.
The order was imposed after a "compelling case" made by prosecutors, despite overwhelming media opposition brought by a legal challenge to the ruling.
[45] In 2011, gagging orders that applied to themselves, or "super-injunctions" as they were called, were being referred to almost daily in the United Kingdom after a number of high-profile public figures, including celebrities and politicians, censored the British media from revealing information about their personal lives, such as affairs[46] and dealings with prostitutes.
[40][47] In The Netherlands, ethologist Gerrit van Putten was given two separate gag orders by the Minister of Agriculture to protect intensive farming.
[48][49][50] In 2015, a Dutch court issued a gag order on writer Edwin Giltay, banning his non-fiction thriller The Cover-up General and prohibiting him to promote it.
The suppression order denied Edwin Giltay to disclose the contents of the book, which delineates an espionage scandal within Dutch military intelligence that he witnessed first-hand, about obscuring evidence of war crimes in Srebrenica.
In the state of Pennsylvania in 2011, a lifetime gag order on the discussion of fracking was agreed to by a family as part of their agreement with the oil and gas drilling company Range Resources.
An attorney for Range Resources claimed in court that the gag order covered not only the adults in the family, but also the children, then aged seven and ten years old, and that the company intended to enforce it.
[61][nb 1] Some U.S. states, the first of which was Florida, have enacted so-called "physician gag laws" limiting doctors' ability to ask about a patient's gun ownership.
[63] On 21 May 1948, a bill was introduced before the Puerto Rican Senate which would restrain the rights of the independence and Nationalist movements on the archipelago, which was a colony of the United States at the time.
[65] Under this new law it became a crime to print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people with a similar destructive intent.
According to Leopoldo Figueroa, the lone non-PPD member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, Law 53 was repressive and was in violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution which guarantees Freedom of Speech.