In overturning Jameel v Wall Street Journal Europe, the House of Lords have handed the British media a significant victory. It is a resounding restatement of the principles set down by Reynolds v Times Newspapers, the seminal case in 2001 that changed libel laws in this country.

With that judgment, Lord Nicholls developed the common law defence of qualified privilege in libel cases to establish a public interest defence for newspaper articles that were the product of responsible journalism. The aim was to strike a better balance between the protection of reputation and freedom of expression, affording greater protection to free speech in cases where a newspaper or broadcaster was unable or unwilling to prove the truth of a defamatory allegation.

The price to be paid for this privilege was "responsible journalism". Lord Nicholls set out ten factors, intended to be illustrative and non-exhaustive, that a judge might take into consideration in deciding whether that test of responsible journalism was met. These included, for example, the tone of the article and whether the article contained the gist of the claimant’s side of the story.

Although there is relatively little evidence about the effect of Reynolds judgment, what evidence does exist suggests it had a beneficial effect on free speech, enabling journalists better to anticipate how to protect themselves when making defamatory allegations whose truth they might be unable to prove and deterring claimants from bringing defamation claims in respect of allegations framed in suitably responsible terms.

When it came to the crunch and a case did actually reach trial, however, newspapers were dismayed and bewildered to find that Reynolds was applied in such a way that they almost always lost the case. It was not enough that the article, taken as a whole, was a piece of responsible journalism on a matter of public interest. Instead, Lord Nicholls' ten relevant factors were elevated into a judicial obstacle course, where every single defamatory allegation was treated in isolation and tested against the ten-point checklist, with any adverse finding potentially fatal to the defence. As a result, Reynolds only succeeded at trial on two occasions.

The Jameel case graphically illustrates the problem. Mr Jameel and a company of his sued the Wall Street Journal Europe after it published an article asserting that his company was one of a number of named Saudi Arabian companies being secretly monitored by SAMA, the Saudi Arabian central bank, at the request of the American Government, to establish whether their bank accounts were being used, wittingly or unwittingly, as sources of terrorist funding. Five months after 9/11, it was hard to think of a topic of greater public interest for the readership of a serious international newspaper. But the defence failed in both the High Court and the Court of Appeal, in the latter on the very narrow basis that the paper had failed to wait to get a comment from Mr Jameel before publication.

In overturning that decision, the law lords have strengthened Reynolds, with guidance designed to ensure that, in future, responsibly written articles on matters of public interest are given the law’s protection.

All of the law lords agreed that there were two distinct issues, whether the article was on a matter of public interest and whether it was the product of responsible journalism. For Lord Hoffman and Baroness Hale, they were two questions that had to be approached in turn. All the law lords agreed that in deciding whether an article is on a matter of public interest, it is the article as a whole that is to be looked at, including the defamatory allegation. It is quite wrong to single out a specific allegation and ask whether it is in the public interest for it to have been published. The public interest test is to be applied to the article as a composite piece of journalism, which is the way in which it is presented to the public.

The second question is whether the article is the product of responsible journalism. In deciding this question, the law lords all emphasise that Lord Nicholls’ ten factors, while remaining useful pointers or indicators, were never intended to be elevated into tests to be satisfied or hurdles to be jumped. The responsible journalism test should be applied in a practical and flexible way, taking into account all the circumstances relevant to the article’s publication.

Again, all the law lords emphasise the importance of context, of looking at the article as a whole, and not fixating on any one allegation to the exclusion of everything else. Where, as in this case, the objection is not to the article as such but to one specific allegation that the claimant says the newspaper should not have included (here the alleged existence of his company’s name on the SAMA list), the courts should make great allowance for the exercise of journalistic and editorial judgement.

As Lord Hoffman puts it, "If the article taken as a whole is in the public interest, opinions may reasonably differ over which details are needed to convey the general message. The fact that the judge, with the advantage of leisure and hindsight, might have made a different editorial decision should not destroy the defence. That would make the publication of articles which are, ex hypothesi, in the public interest, too risky and would discourage investigative reporting."

Every newspaper and broadcaster should welcome this important judgement, which significantly strengthens press freedom to report on matters of public interest. The law lords' message is loud and clear: let us hope that the lower courts are listening.

Guy Vassall-Adams is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers specialising in media law. He was second junior counsel for the Wall Street Journal Europe before the House of Lords on this case.