Month: May 2011 (Page 1 of 5)

Men in gowns are no match for nerds with wifi connections. But we have the balance about right. Where is the line between privacy and free speech and who should mark it? Lawyers will declaim according to which cow they’re milking, and the views of our media emperors might easily strip their own courtiers of clothes. Continue reading

In the first part of this series, we considered how the ECHR has expanded the scope of article 8 rights, beyond the “new strength and breadth” which Lord Woolf had predicted in 2002 (in A v B) that the mis-named action for “disclosure of confidential information which would infringe privacy” would have. We will now go on to consider the circumstances in which Lord Woolf felt that there could be a countervailing public interest in disclosure, in fulfilment of article 10 rights and contrast them with the relevant circumstances following Von Hannover. We then also consider to what extent the court’s current approach would ever allow the media to discuss the private lives of celebrities. Continue reading

Mark Thomson has accused the media of self-interest in their reporting of the mis-named “super-injunctions ” scandal. This criticism is an easy one to make but, putting aside the potential conflict of interest, the media are right to object to the courts’ current approach to privacy cases, even if not for all of the reasons on which they rely. Important issues are raised by the apparent willingness of courts to accept that reasonable expectations of privacy exist and that they outweigh freedom of expression, which we explore in this two-part series. Continue reading