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Lord Steyn, giving judgement in the High Court, said: "Very often a sensational or serious criminal trial will be of great interest in the community where it took place.

"A regional or local newspaper is likely to give prominence to it. That happens every day up and down the country.

"For local newspapers, who do not have the financial resources of national newspapers, the spectre of being involved in costly legal proceedings is bound to have a chilling effect.

"If local newspapers are threatened with the prospect of an injunction such as is now under consideration it is likely that they will often be silenced."

The House of Lords said that allowing non-parties to invoke the Human Rights Act to restrict reporting of criminal trials "would confront newspapers with an ever wider spectrum of potentially costly proceedings and would seriously inhibit the freedom of the press to report criminal trials".

The Lordships said in their ruling: "From a newspaper's point of view a report of a sensational trial without revealing the identity of the defendant would be a very much disembodied trial.

"If the newspapers choose not to contest such an injunction, they are less likely to give prominence to reports of the trial.

"Certainly, readers will be less interested and editors will act accordingly. Informed debate about criminal justice will suffer."

He said that the European Court of Human Rights has stressed that the press, as the public's watchdog, could report everything that happened in a criminal court, and that a criminal trial was a "public event".

He said a remarkable acquittal was as much in the public interest as a surprise conviction, and that open justice was a valuable check on the criminal process.

The trial in question will be heard soon at the Old Bailey.

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