Daily View: Super-injunctions spark privacy debate
In the midst of speculation about celebrities super-injunctions commentators discuss the right to privacy.
privacy laws have “gone badly wrong”:
“In a judgment banning pictures of Princess Caroline of Monaco taken in a public place, the European Court laid down an incoherent definition of privacy as protecting ‘a zone of interaction of a person with others, even in a public context, to ensure the development of the personality of each individual in his relations with other human beings’. Now part of UK law, this psycho-babble has become the basis for protecting the ‘personality development’ of celebrities threatened by ‘kiss and sell’ stories from discarded lovers as well, it is said, as stories of some public import. British judges now insist that the right of free speech be ‘balanced’ against the right to privacy when deciding whether to suppress a news story. This involves a subjective value judgement. Very often the impact on children of a father’s sexually-incontinent behaviour and a dislike of tabloid sensationalism will weigh in the judicial mind more heavily than the rights of the kisser to tell or the public to know.
“And in such cases, where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, it is logical for the judge to stop the public from knowing anything: if they are told: ‘Mr X has obtained an injunction’, they will assume the worst about his indiscretions. His privacy will be violated in the public imagination. Hence the secret court super-injunction, which gags all reference to the plaintiff and to the proceedings.”
Professor and Head of Journalism at London’s City University that new privacy laws should be used to restore meaning to an “abused” idea:
“I’d lean the law towards assuming that disclosure should only be prevented for a very strong reason. But journalists would only enjoy that presumption in their favour if they could demonstrate that a disclosure would be in the public interest. Celebrity news of the kind that is nowadays routine would rarely get that protection if taken to court.
“What’s interesting to me - and everyone else - isn’t automatically in the public interest. That short phrase has been corrupted by red-top papers for their own self-serving ends in a ferociously competitive market. We need a law that restores that much abused idea to its true sense.”
Media lawyer that the revelations are not in the public interest:
“One basis of a civilized and liberal society is that information that only concerns the private lives of those involved should remain privy to them, unless there is a public interest to the contrary. Everyone needs a private space, even celebrities and politicians.”
He goes on to say the reason why these stories are so popular is because the The background to all this is that the word “super-injunction” now has a “special and exciting quality”:
“This is strange as, in one important way, ‘super-injunctions’ do not really exist. What the High Court can offer are injunctions: court orders directed at parties so as to prevent certain specified courses of action. A ‘superinjunction’ is just a normal injunction but with strict terms, and it is not an entirely new legal creature. Strict injunctions are as old as the equitable jurisdiction of the High Court.
“Not even in colloquial terms is there an agreed description of what is a ‘super-injunction’. The best practical definition is that it is an injunction, the terms of which mean that disclosure to a third party that the injunction even exists would itself be a breach of the injunction.”
that the element of hypocrisy is what makes the public so interested in super-injunctions:
“Ultimately as the host of Popbitch said on Channel 4 News last night, the biggest trigger to journalistic interest in this stuff is hypocrisy - where the individual invites OK, or HELLO magazines into their lives and gives an account at complete odds with the real lives they lead.
“One clue - never talk about your private life to a media entity (online or old-media) that specialises in exposure, whether or not you have something to hide. It almost always ends in tears.”
The that unless Parliament debates the issue - and, in particular, unless the Convention of Human Rights is replaced by a British Bill of Rights, super-injunctions are unlikely to go away:
“The super-injunction has been seized upon by judges interpreting Article Eight of the Human Rights Convention, which upholds the right to privacy, in favour of plaintiffs and against newspapers.
“Without this Convention, foolishly incorporated into our law by the last Labour government, there would be no super-injunctions because there would be no such privacy cases. Whatever proposals Lord Neuberger and his committee may come up with, the root of the problem lies with the privacy law that judges are introducing on the basis of Article Eight.”
