I missed this at the time as we were all concentrating on the Supreme Court judgment.
Wings Over Scotland is a website that looks at Scottish politics and is generally gender critical.
Back in 2023, the guy who runs it made some comments on Twitter following the death of Brianna Ghey (the young trans person murdered by two other pupils).
These included:
the Interested Party posted about the reaction of other people to Brianna’s murder. He noted that it had been suggested at an early stage that the murder was hate-related; and commented as follows: “These disgusting ghouls are SO excited that a trans person has finally been murdered in the UK, so they can use it to attack [JK] Rowling and “TERFs”, that they can’t bring themselves to wait even a day for the facts”. The post was accompanied by a quotation from the police stating that they were not, at that point in time, treating the murder as a hate crime.
Anyway, a person by the name of Lynsay Watson (a former policeman who had previously gone after Harry Miller of We Are Fair Cop) tried to get the Greater Manchester police to charge him with an offence of malicious communication for these tweets.
GMP looked at the evidence and declined to do that.
Watson then started a judicial review of that decision. The judgment was given on the same day as the SC judgment.
The judgment goes through a lot of recent relevant case law and then, quite clearly, says that the police did nothing wrong:
73 ... The [police's] conclusion properly reflected society’s fundamental values of free speech, including the need for tolerance of statements and opinions that some might find offensive or upsetting.
.
But what I found interesting was that Watson claimed that these tweets were a form of "psychological punishment, which amounted to degrading treatment ... and/or a breach of their rights to privacy and family life"
The court said that it was not realistic that Watson had suffered "psychological punishment" just because the other person had not been charged. The court also said that even if Watson's Article 8 rights (to private life) were engaged - although the judge couldn't see how they would be - they would be outweighed by the need to uphold the freedom of expression under Article 10.
Watson, R (On the Application Of) v Campbell (Rev1) [2025] EWHC 954 (Admin) (16 April 2025)