My Second Summons against BBC

Instead of appealing the striking out of my first summons, in March 1997 I issued a second, differently worded summons against the BBC. I was encouraged to do this by Usenet participant Paul Janik, who gave me a text to use for a second summons, with the suggestion that it might be more successful than the first. I claimed an injunction to stop the newscaster spying, and minor damages.



Again the BBC applied to have my claim struck out, and again they succeeded. The hearing was on 11 Apr 1997 and one part of the order was to prevent me from suing the BBC again without permission of the court. I do not know if this order had legal validity, because I sued as a litigant in person without legal expertise. The BBC got what they wanted and I was very disappointed. The district judge explained she was making the order to save me money, because each time I sued it cost a fixed sum of £ 80, although the BBC did not seek to recover their costs from me. She suggested that for the action to go ahead I would need some material evidence, such as a tape recording showing a newscaster reacting to what they saw in my house.

Paul Janik was friendly with police and claimed to be in contact with a security service agent. His real motive in encouraging me to sue again was revealed a few days later. I contemporaneously brought a complaint against MI5 to the Security Service Tribunal, who gave my details to MI5, as listed elsewhere on this website. A few days after MI5 got my name Janik posted my name, home address in London and phone number to an internet newsgroup, with the intention of silencing further complaints. It is still in the Google archive. He claimed he got my details from the BBC, but the BBC's solicitor Emma Hovanassian, who dealt with the case and attended both hearings, said Janik had phoned her anonymously, claiming that he was also in legal action with me (which he was not), and she confirmed my name to him, but he already had my name from another source which he did not disclose, which was obviously the security service seeking to silence me.