Trafigura - a battle won, but a war still to fight.

Two days ago, very few people had heard of Trafigura. Yesterday, Trafigura took legal action to try to keep it that way, but obtaining a court order stopping The Guardian from printing the already public information that an MP was about to ask a question about them in parliament. Today, thanks to an avalanche of outrage that made Trafigura the number 1 most talked about topic on twitter, nearly everyone on the net knows who they are and what they did.

It would be easy to congratulate our society for overturning an obvious injustice, to pat twitter users, the Spectator and many brave political bloggers on the back for kicking up enough fuss to force a climbdown. We could say that justice has been done, and that all's well now, but a bigger, more fundamental problem remains.

We still live in a country where newspapers can be gagged for reporting the workings of parliament.

It's not enough to say that the 'Streisand effect' has made it more difficult to hush things up, or that wikileaks gives us a chance to bypass this sort of censorship. We need a legal system that doesn't issue injunctions on public information, a legal system that defends free speech instead of quashing it, a legal system that provides written guarantees of access to government information.

The battle of Trafigura has been won, but the war for free speech and free access to information remains to be fought.