Although the news site is left-leaning, and has previously been accused of trying to bring down the French right-wing by exposing the Sarkozy-Bettencourt scandal, it recently proved that it can do investigative journalism without a left-leaning political agenda by exposing the 'affaire Cahuzac'. Jérôme Cahuzac, the Socialist minister in charge of tax enforcement until last month, has himself been exposed for concealing money in bank accounts abroad for more than two decades, and has finally, thanks in part to Mediapart, been forced to confess that he is still storing €600,000 in a Singapore account.

This significant act of French investigative journalism inevitably prompts reflection that, in the UK, the new Royal Charter will make it increasingly difficult to carry out investigative journalism of this kind without encountering hefty damages and demands for amendments and apologies. Mediapart is a shining example of the independent press, working to expose injustice and to uphold democratic values "at a time of historic crises in the media and society as a whole."

At a time when the British press is liverish with reaction to the Leveson report, it is worth noting the irony that an event of far greater global moment concerning the defence and propagation of a free press is passing almost without remark. At a conference that begins today in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 193 countries will decide whether the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency, should update its International Telecommunication Regulations in order to start actively regulating the Internet. The web has long been shorthand for sprawling, anarchic ungovernability, a ‘nightmare’, as the Economist puts it, ‘for the tidy-minded, and especially for authoritarian governments.’ Indeed, the agenda appears at first to give some cause for concern; some 900 regulatory changes have been proposed covering the Internet, mobile roaming fees and satellite and fixed-line communications, and specific amendments from Russia, China and some Arab countries (17 of the latter pressing for ‘identity information’ about the senders of data) undoubtedly carry the insidious subtext of censorship and autocratic control.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron will sit down in the next month to consider his response to the Leveson Inquiry into media standards and must then decide whether to accept its recommendations on media regulation.

When he does so, I wonder if the changes to the South Africa system announced last week will be brought to his attention.

The press in both countries have until now been self-regulated. While the context and circumstances are vastly different, journalistic practices and ethics in both have been under scrutiny and politicians and disaffected publics have been threatening to rein in the media because of a perceived failure of self-regulation.

South Africa’s print media last week announced it would adopt a system of independent co-regulation between the media and the public. A retired judge would head a new press council, equally divided between media and members of the public, eliminating media bias.

In the UK this weekend there was much debate about which way the government would go. Cameron promised no state regulation of the press. However he said he would take heed of Leveson’s recommendations, unless they were bonkers or heavy-handed.

Today the Leveson Inquiry has heard more revelations regarding the behaviour of the British tabloid press.

To summarise, witnesses today included Christopher Jefferies, who was falsely accused and vilified by the media as the killer of Joanna Yates; Ian Hurst, a former British army intelligence officer whose computers was allegedly hacked by the News of the World in order to obtain details of an IRA informer; Jane Winter, a peace and human rights campaigner in Ireland; Anne Diamond, a former television presenter; and Charlotte Church, a singer who was thrust into the limelight at a very young age. You can read coverage of the whole thing here.

Jeffries related that he felt as if he were under "house arrest" after his arrest by police and that he had to stay with numerous friends to avoid media scrutiny, feeling "rather as if I was a recusant priest at the time of the Reformation, going from safe house to safe house".