What follows is WAN-IFRA’s ‘conclusions’ on the subject of press self-regulation in the UK, in italics, with our comments:The vast majority of the British press adhere to professional standards and abide by ethical practices. The actions of a minority should not tarnish the entire profession and there should be greater acknowledgment of the essentially positive public interest role of journalism in the United Kingdom.

It is striking if not surprising that the first thought of WAN-IFRA, a trade association of newspapers, is for the good name of the British press. The victims of press abuse, and the British public that risks being victims in the future, are not even on the radar. The criticism is of the large majority of the press - industrial scale unlawful behaviour, repeated unethical practice, a conspiracy of silence over the exposure of the activity – which does tarnish the reputation of British press. This leads everyone, except WAN-IFRA it seems, to the question “what is to be done to prevent it?”

The hacking scandal has caused a severe breach in confidence between the public and the press that needs to be addressed.

Of course it is not just the hacking scandal as the Leveson Report made clear. But as we will see, in WAN-IFRA’s view addressing this breach should involve no proper acknowledgment of past wrongdoing by the UK press and no requirement that a future system of regulation should be both independent and effective.

It is important, however, not to convolute the hacking scandal with the current regulatory debate. British law provides appropriate remedy for illegal activity in proven cases of wrongdoing.

The Leveson Inquiry, after looking into this for a year, found that there was a clear link between hacking (and other unethical or illegal conduct) and failures of regulation: hacking happened because of a failure of corporate governance which was one of many symptoms of a more general failure of standards across the industry – a failure that might have been prevented if press self-regulation had been effective. And as Leveson discussed at length, much wrongdoing either involves illegal activity which is hard to detect or involves activity which is not contrary to the law. Such activity nevertheless has victims who need to be protected.

Furthermore, failures in civil litigation are not the responsibility of the press.

No, but serial offending is. Has WAN-IFRA asked itself why a group of UK national newspapers libelled Robert Murat, then libelled the McCanns in the same way, and then libelled Christopher Jefferies? Does the press have a responsibility to obey the law, or can it just pay the damages and offend again?

Wider reforms and improved access to affordable, efficient civil litigation should be demanded to ensure public confidence in this recourse.

If the WAN-IFRA “fact finders” had read and absorbed the Leveson Report they would have understood that effective access to justice, by means of low cost arbitration, is at the centre of his recommendations for a new self-regulator. It is a recommendation which has been rejected by the UK Press who have proposed no alternative – and continue to campaign to restrict access to affordable justice.

The corporate culture inside media organisations where abuses of professional and ethical codes of conduct have been uncovered should be closely examined and the reasons for the breakdown fully exposed.

This is, of course, exactly what Leveson did. His report looked at ‘the culture, practice and ethics of the press’. He spent a year on it and came up with recommendations endorsed by the victims, the public and our democratic representatives. Does WAN-IFRA want it all done again? By whom? The press itself? Or does it just not like the Leveson’s conclusions?

Work should be done throughout the media structure to reinstate professional standards and regain public trust in the heart of instigating this, with full transparency and a commitment to public accountability.

WAN-IFRA do not appear to have noticed that this was the central aim of Leveson’s recommendations. The big newspaper groups don’t even admit that anything has gone wrong and have fought to dilute and neuter Leveson’s proposals. There is no chance whatever of them spontaneously trying to fix it. WAN-IFRA cites no evidence to the contrary.

There is a suggestion of ‘political payback’ in the current regulation reform process following the MPs expenses scandal exposed by the press, and it should be acknowledged that this could have negatively influenced, not only how a new system of regulation has been established, but also the motivation behind calls for tighter controls over the press.

‘There is a suggestion’? By whom? WAN-IFRA does not name its source? It’s obvious this comes from the big newspaper groups trying, once again, to deflect criticism of their appalling record by setting up the straw man of the revengeful politician. If WAN-IFRA found evidence to support this claim it should produce it. Otherwise it should withdraw this. The Royal Charter scheme gives even less of a role for elected politicians than the “statutory recognition” scheme recommended by Leveson. In Ireland, the recognition body for self-regulators is the justice minister. In the UK under the Royal Charter it is politician-free independent panel, appointed by a politician-free appointments Committee, in turn selected by a politician-free appointments commissioner.

In accordance with international human rights law, self-regulation provides for the least restrictions on press freedom. Any move away from this preferred situation should be fully debated and explained in an open, public and transparent manner in order to properly weigh the implications for current and future societies.

WAN-IFRA may not have been paying attention, but Britain has had years of debate on self-regulation, one year of it formally conducted in a public inquiry led by a senior judge. Few matters of public concern have been more exhaustively aired. The problem for WAN-IFRA, of course, is that the public has come to a conclusion their British members don’t like.

Self-regulation, however, should be meaningful and effective, providing for adequate complaints handling, a way of ensuring high professional and ethical standards, and firm protections for freedom of expression.

What about the public? Self-regulation should provide an effective, trustworthy service for the public, ensuring that complaints are vigorously pursued and satisfactory remedies provided. Under self-regulation every code breach matters because people’s well-being is concerned; the self-regulator should actively monitor code compliance. WAN-IFRA’s total neglect of the interests of the public in this context is shameful. And the central recommendation of Leveson – that any new self-regulator must be independently audited for independence and effectiveness – is precisely to ensure that “self-regulation should provide an effective, trustworthy service for the public”. It is this that the UK press is opposing.

Self-regulation under the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was perceived to have failed both the public and the profession of journalism, although its role as a complaint handling body has been praised.

‘Was perceived to have failed’? Almost nobody in Britain, from the Prime Minister to Christopher Jefferies, takes any other view. And if WAN-IFRA had read the Leveson report it would have found that the PCC’s complaints handling was severely criticised.

There is an element of statutory underpinning to the Royal Charter system that makes adherence problematic for those – particularly the press – unwilling to cede any ground to legislation specifically governing the press.

The UK press is very keen to have legislation which “specifically governs the press” where this exempts them from duties placed on others. In the past few weeks they have been campaigning for a press exemption from the new EU Data Protection Regulation. What they don’t like is legislation which, in any way, subjects them to obligations and responsibilities.

If WAN-IFRA had properly studied the Royal Charter scheme they would have understood that the legislation does not “govern the press” at all – but simple underpins a mechanism for ensuring that a self-regulatory body (in contrast to the designedly ineffective bodies set up by the press in the past) actually works. And of course in almost every other country form which WAN-IFRA draws its members, and almost all of those 30 which rank above the UK in indices of press freedom, there is legislation which directly governs the press.

Publishers are not encouraged to ‘voluntarily’ sign up to a regulator governed by the Royal Charter system – punitive damages for non-compliance are an explicit threat should they decide not to. This defies any definition of ‘voluntary’ as understood by the WANN-IFRA delegation.

This is straw man. Unlike the failed PCC it is not intended to be a purely voluntary system. It is incentivised and clearly described as such. Newspapers are encouraged to do something that, for example, the overwhelming majority of their readers want them to do. And no, punitive damages are not a threat – they already exist, but papers are offered immunity from them if they join. That’s not a threat but an incentive. There are no “punitive damages for non-compliance”.

The United Kingdom suffers from its lack of constitutional-level guarantees for freedom of expression. Fundamental rights will inevitably be subject to the whims of parliament and interpreted by the ‘government of the day’. With no legal safety net for journalism, press freedom will continue to rely on benign political promises. Arguably, written legal protection for the press could help mitigate the fear expressed by some publishers of falling under a regulatory system that is established in law and that could be detrimentally changed if parliament so chose. How this (for example a UK Bill of Rights) could be achieved without encouraging the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Human Rights Convention should be further explored.

WAN-IFRA may not have noticed, but the UK has no “constitutional level guarantees” of anything – because it has no written constitution. The nearest thing we have is the Human Rights Act – which provides express protection for freedom of expression and has been successfully relied on many times by the UK Press, (much of which is, ironically, campaigning to abolish it). Furthermore, the Leveson Report proposed additional protection – specifically for the press. This would be the first time that such a protection had formed part of English law. This was not objected to by politicians (or by the victims of press abuse).

The reason it hasn’t happened was that it was opposed by most of the UK press – who were afraid that their feeble self-interested arguments against proper regulation would look even weaker if there was a statutory guarantee of press freedom. When it comes down to it, the only press freedom they are worried about is the freedom to bully, lie and intrude without anyone holding them to account.

The speed of implementation of the Royal Charter proposal, coupled with the lack of legislative scrutiny, parliamentary vote or public consultation, has undoubtedly contributed to a general lack of understanding around the issues.

Everyone – including the UK press – agreed that the Leveson recommendations needed to be implemented quickly. The issues had been extensively debated in public, in the Inquiry and in the press for 18 months. Between the Leveson Report and the endorsement of the Royal Charter by Parliament, four months passed. All parties in the House of Commons backed it (an exceptionally rare occurrence), and the motion endorsing it passed without there being sufficient dissenters to call for a counted vote. A subsequent ‘test’ motion passed by 530 votes to 13. Any lack of understanding is the result of a long campaign of press misinformation.

The entire negotiation process in the build-up to a deal on a new system for regulation should have been more transparent. The exclusion of the industry in the final drafting process of the Royal Charter was a major error, if the intention was for a genuine improvement in the culture, ethics and professionalism of the press.

This is a shameless travesty of the facts. The people who run the big newspaper companies, by their own admission, took part in ‘intensive’ and secret discussions on the Charter with only the Prime Minister’s political party over a period of 2 months, starting the day after the Report was published. The specific product of those talks was rejected by Parliament on behalf of the public. The final Charter was however simply a transposition of the Leveson Report, with a few concessions to the press industry. The intention was to provide an independent “audit” body to ensure that the self-regulator actually worked. The body finally proposed, the Chartered Recognition Panel, commands wide agreement across the whole of civil society and across political parties. The only dissenters are the big newspaper companies who have a vested interest in ineffective regulation.

A solution that did not include any of the media industry is entirely counterproductive, and can be described as no form of solution at all.

The solution provides a central role for the media industry: they set up the self-regulator which is then “audited” by the recognition panel. Many concessions have been made to meet their concerns.

Editors representing a wide cross-section of the industry should be responsible for drafting or amending any new Code of Practice, with the assistance of individuals from outside the profession. They should all be independent of any regulatory body or legally defined oversight committee.

It is interesting that WAN-IFRA does not suggest any role for journalists in drafting a Code of Practice. This runs contrary to the position in most of the countries where WAN-IFRA has members and appears to be a concession to the powerful “Editors Code Committee” in the UK (Chair, Paul Dacre). As with every other industry or profession, the regulator should be ultimately responsible for the Code of Practice it enforces. Editors should have a role in drawing up this code – but not a decisive one - along with journalists and members of the public.

There has been a real lack of public discussion about the implications of the issues raised by the Leveson Inquiry and their effects – positively or negatively – for freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.

This is a repetition of a point based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what has happened. There has, we repeat, been an intensive public debate of these issues. The public understand the issues and want effective and independent press regulation. It is true that, to their shame, the national newspapers which WAN-IFRA represents, have tried to close down discussion by ignoring every point of view except their own. Like censors, the editors routinely exclude views they do not endorse.

The on-going polarisation between the different sides in the debate has not helped.

This is another myth relentlessly promoted by the big newspaper groups. They have consistently refused to debate the issues – whether in their pages or by meeting victims of press abuse and supporters of Leveson. Instead, they have delivered relentless personal attacks on those supporters – and then, with characteristic hypocrisy, complained that the debate is becoming polarised. For the record, Hacked Off is ready to talk to anyone, at any time, about implementing the Leveson recommendations and providing protection for ordinary British people from abuse by newspapers. We explained this to WAN-IFRA when we met them.

The Royal Charter system - used as an example or transposed elsewhere to countries lacking the United Kingdom’s historic commitment to human rights risks an open invitation for abuse in other parts of the world.

This is ridiculous. No other country could adopt the Royal Charter system, but if they could, they would find it protected ordinary people from press abuses while rigorously safeguarding freedom of expression and while also protecting press regulation from political involvement or interference.

Political assurances that the Royal Charter scheme provides a hands-off solution for press regulation and can guarantee press freedom are somewhat undermined by the readiness of the UK government to intervene against the Guardian newspaper.

This is a non-sequitur. The Charter is about ethical behaviour; the debate about the Snowden affair concerns national security. An effective and independent regulator could defend the press against unwarranted political attack – unlike the big newspaper groups represented by WAN-IFRA which shamelessly joined in the persecution of the Guardian on the side of the Government – in what was widely seen as “payback” for that newspaper’s exposure of wrongdoing in the Murdoch press. To quote the WAN-IFRA report’s conclusions on the Guardian issue.

‘But as Alan Rusbridger stated, tying in the WAN-IFRA mission’s two main focus areas, “If the press can’t see the public interest difference between hacking and the NSA reporting, then the argument for self-regulation is rendered meaningless.’