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A former high-ranking British official says that online news articles about high profile court cases should be removed from Internet news archives.

Lord Falconer says such online articles should be pulled from archives so they don't influence the outcome of a case. He says such a practice would likely involve about 20 cases a year that receive heavy pre-trial media coverage.

The Attorney General would determine which cases would be affected according to Falconer. "I think the state needs to be better at identifying those cases in which they think there's a contempt risk," he told BBC Radio.

News organizations would be required to remove articles from their archives that were written before an arrest was made and the case became active. If they refused to do so "it would be very strong evidence they'd committed contempt," he said.

Charles Collier-Wright, group legal manager at Trinity Mirror, said removing articles from online archives would be a challenge to news organizations and is not practical. "I think it would be absurd if anyone seriously argued that newspaper archives should be removed just for fear that somebody might go and do a bit of research on them in relation to a case that might be coming up," he said.

"Newspaper information has always been accessible to anyone who really wanted to do it - you can go to libraries and find it out."

Falconer says articles should be made unavailable only temporarily. He says that search engines would also be required to keep material relating to cases from ranking high in the search results.

"By the click of the button you can go on to the Internet and get access to the press coverage there may have been at the time the person on trial was arrested," Donald Findlay QC, a barrister from Scotland said. "That might disclose all sorts of speculation about the circumstances of the crime, all sorts of information you are not supposed to have if you're serving on a jury."

Catrin Turner, a partner and online law specialist at Pinsent Masons, said taking down a Web page would not solve the problem. "Web sites are hosted on servers all over the world," she said. "If one hoster is ordered to remove information because it is in contempt, it is very easy for that information to pop up on another Web site."