Libel and harassment: another family dispute

High court libel disputes between family members occur with alarming regularity. In the latest instalment, Bukhari v Bukhari [2025] EWHC 2391 (KB), the Claimant, a successful businessman who served as a minister in Imran Khan’s government, sued his first cousin for harassment in respect of a course of conduct involving the publication of 249 tweets and for libel in relation to allegations contained within 40 of those tweets (or the videos they contained).

The online content published by the Defendant tended to focus on the same themes, often conveyed in the same or very similar terms. These included that the Claimant:-

had inherited his wealth from his father and other senior family members, who had accumulated it illegally;
had stolen land and valuables from the Defendant’s father;
had threatened the Defendant and his parents and then arranged for the Defendant to be attacked; and
is corrupt, dishonest and guilty of fraud.

Issues for determination

As a result of the Defendant’s failure to plead any substantive permissible defence, the only issue for consideration vis-à-vis liability in the libel claim was whether the Defendant’s publication of one or more of the posts complained of had caused or was likely to cause serious harm to the Claimant’s reputation.

As to liability for harassment, the Court was required to determine whether the Defendant’s publication of his posts constituted a course of conduct amounting to harassment; whether he knew or ought to have known that that was the case; and whether (if the threshold of harassment was satisfied) his conduct was reasonable in the circumstances so as to give him a defence under section 1(3)(c) of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

Serious harm

The Claimant advanced an inferential case on serious harm based primarily on the circumstances of publication, including the gravity of the allegations and the extent of publication. Of the 40 publications complained of, Deputy High Court Judge Aidan Eardley KC found that five tweets and three videos had caused serious harm to the Claimant’s reputation. In respect of the tweets, the Judge considered in his multi-factorial assessment whether a reader had “liked” or retweeted a post, which he regarded as “evidence that they have read and paid attention to the tweet in a way that is likely to have affected their view”. The Judge’s reliance on social media engagements was consistent with the approach taken by the Court in earlier cases, including Riley v Murray [2021] EWHC 3437, and highlights the importance of capturing screenshots of the offending posts as soon as possible, before a defendant might choose to delete them.

Harassment

The Judge unambiguously concluded that the Defendant’s social media campaign had “all the hallmarks of a course of conduct amounting to harassment”. The posts were frequent, extremely repetitive and targeted at the Claimant (who was tagged in many of them). Some of the posts also contained an element of taunting, a factor which might make a course of conduct in the form of free speech amount to harassment, when otherwise it would not be harassment.

The Judge flatly dismissed the Defendant’s attempt to portray himself as a public interest campaigner or journalist and determined that his course of conduct was not reasonable in all the circumstances.

The most interesting aspect of the judgment relates to how the Judge addressed the line of authorities starting with Shakil-Ur-Rahman v ARY Network Ltd & Anor [2016] EWHC 3110. In Rahman the Court accepted a submission that the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 “is clearly premised on and directed at acts committed within the jurisdiction of the court” but held that the claimant must also experience, in this jurisdiction, the impact of being harassed, before the tort is complete.

In Bukhari the Judge sought to guard against introducing unnecessary artificiality into the law of harassment by taking into account all of the tweets and videos as constituting the course of conduct which had all been published whilst the Defendant was in England and Wales. In other words, it was sufficient for the Claimant to experience some of the adverse effects of the course of conduct while in England and Wales even if such effects were also experienced elsewhere at other times. The Judge held, however, that the Claimant could only be compensated for the distress he had been caused whilst present within the jurisdiction.

Applying well-establishing principles, the Judge awarded the Claimant £40,000 in damages for libel and £3,000 for the distress caused to the Claimant by the Defendant’s harassment (which the Claimant experienced whilst in England and Wales).

Comment

This is another broadly helpful decision for claimants based abroad who wish to avail themselves of Court’s protection where they are being harassed by a perpetrator based in England and Wales. The pragmatic approach adopted by the Judge means that claimants need not worry about claims drifting in and out of actionability, provided that they can show experienced at least some of the harassment when in England and Wales. What the Judge was not required to grapple with, however, was the more fundamental question of whether there need be any impact on a claimant for the tort to be established. In Majrowski v. Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Trust [2006] UKHL 34 Baroness Hale stated that, “…conduct might be harassment even if no alarm or distress were in fact caused. A great deal is left to the wisdom of the courts to draw sensible lines between the ordinary banter and badinage of life and genuinely offensive and unacceptable behaviour.” There are other authorities which suggest that that distress is a constituent and necessary element of the tort. Given the increasing number of harassment claims involving cross-jurisdictional communications, this issue will doubtless require further consideration soon.