Craig Murray

Judgment (High Court of Justiciary) · 2021-03-25

The finding

HM Advocate v Craig Murray [2021] HCJ 2

Alex Salmond was tried at the High Court in Edinburgh from 9 March 2020 and acquitted on all charges on 23 March 2020. Craig Murray had published articles about the arrest and prosecution.

The High Court of Justiciary, in an opinion delivered by Lady Dorrian, the Lord Justice Clerk, sitting with Lord Menzies and Lord Turnbull, found that blog posts by Craig Murray breached an order under section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. The order prohibited publishing the complainers’ names or any information likely to disclose their identity.

The test the court applied was whether the material, judged objectively, was likely to lead to identification by members of the public, not only by people who already knew the complainers. The court rejected a separate allegation that articles about a dismissed juror breached a section 4(2) postponement order.

Legal news report of a judgment · 2021-05-11

The sentence and the appeal

On 11 May 2021 the court imposed eight months’ imprisonment, and delayed the warrant for three weeks to allow an appeal.

In June 2021 the court refused permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court. It held the sentence proportionate, noting that the maximum is two years, and said his conduct struck at the heart of the fair administration of justice. It suspended the warrant for four weeks to allow a direct application to the Supreme Court.

Blog reporting · 2026-11-08

The Palestine Action hearing in the Supreme Court

He published accounts of the first and second days of the Supreme Court hearing on the Palestine Action ban, including the closed session. We use them for courtroom detail, cross-checked against other reports.

Coverage limitation

Gaps

Still to read and add: the June 2021 opinion refusing permission to appeal, reported as [2021] HCJ 3; reports that the UK Supreme Court itself refused permission in July 2021; and the 2022 opinions on his petitions to the nobile officium, reported as [2022] HCJAC 5 and [2022] HCJAC 14. We have not yet read them, and we do not yet state how much of the sentence he served.