5A Defamation : Who can Sue?
Individuals
Any living individual can sue for defamation; the dead cannot i.e. an estate or relatives of a deceased person cannot sue for libel over defamatory statements made about the deceased person.
Companies
Companies can sue if the defamatory statement is in connection with its business or trading reputation.
Residents overseas
Foreigners can and do sue in the UK, even when they are not allowed to enter the country e.g. Roman Polanski, who lives in Paris successfully sued Vanity Fair, a US publication, in England because the magazine had a limited circulation there. In fact, London is often referred to as the "libel capital of the world", as it is one of the easiest places in which to sue for libel.
A Group of Individuals
A group or class of individuals, if sufficiently defined, can also sue e.g. it would be defamatory to say that all strikers of a particular football team took performance enhancing drugs and each one could potentially sue, even though none had been named specifically. The larger the class of individuals defamed, the less likely unnamed individuals would be able to sue.
Taking the above example, unnamed individual players could not sue on the generalised allegation that players in the Premier League took performance enhancing drugs. Similarly, individual unnamed goal keepers would not be able to sue on the generalised allegation that all professional goal keepers take ‘bungs', because the class is too large.
Government bodies, which include for example local authorities, the police, state schools and NHS hospitals cannot bring libel claims. If, however, individual members, officers or employees are the subject of the defamatory statements these individuals can sue.
'Jigsaw Identification'
Sometimes television programmes/newspapers report defamatory allegations but, for one reason or another e.g. they are not confident they can actually prove the allegations, they do not identify the individual or organisation they are referring to, only giving certain details which they hope will be insufficient for viewers/readers to work out who is being referred to.
This is risky not least because, following publication, third parties e.g. other media organisations or even just individuals on the internet, may identify the individual or organisation to which the programme/newspaper was referring. Thus the allegations have been made and the person has been identified. When this happens, the question of where liability for defamation lies is not clear and it is likely that the person or organisation who considers themselves defamed would attempt to sue the original programme or newspaper that originally made the allegations, as other potential defendants i.e. those that actually identified the subject of the allegations, may be difficult to track down or have little money e.g. website publications.