10 Jun 11 | Events
Date: Tuesday 28 June 2011
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, LSE, New Academic Building
Speakers: Max Mosley, David Price, Hugh Tomlinson and Suzanne Moore
Chair: Jo Glanville
A public debate to celebrate the launch of the new issue of Index on Censorship magazine, Privacy is dead! Long live privacy. Index editor Jo Glanville chairs a panel featuring Hugh Tomlinson QC, who represents Ryan Giggs, former F1 president Max Mosley, Imogen Thomas’ lawyer David Price and Suzanne Moore columnist for the Daily Mail and the Guardian who will discuss gagging orders, tabloid intrusion and the right to a private life.
* Are injunctions a means to uphold our human rights or an unjust anachronism after the recent Twitter exposés?
* Should Article 10, the right to freedom of expression, trump Article 8, the right to respect for a private life?
* Are celebrities’ personal lives fair game?
This event is now sold out but LSE will be operating a returns queue situated outside the Sheikh Zayed Theatre. Any seats left empty by ticketholders will be filled by those in the returns queue shortly before the start of the event. Entry via the returns queue is not guaranteed.
There will be a live videolink of this event to the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building. Entry to the videolink will be on a first come, first served basis with no ticket required. Doors will open from around 6pm.
21 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
The Daily Mail are angry about injunctions issued by “amoral judges” to protect “celebrity secrets”. Developments in court have been reported on the Daily Mail’s front page on successive days, while inside the paper Stephen Glover has argued that a series of rulings have left Britain “not many steps away from a police state”.
The people behind these injunctions, who tend to be identified by letter codes, appear to be a banker, an actor, a couple of television personalities and several professional footballers. They have had affairs while married, or have paid prostitutes for sex, and I think in one case there is a child born out of wedlock. The injunctions are keeping these stories, and the identities of those involved, out of the Mail and other papers.
Here is a general observation: other people’s sex lives are not my business. I may find the stories interesting and I might gossip about them, but I don’t believe I have a right to know about them. On the contrary, I think people should be allowed to keep such things private.
The Mail calls these people “wrongdoers” and “miscreants” and says they are “shameless”. This is probably a minority view. Adultery and divorce are common and — even if it is only through television documentaries or dramas — most of us have some idea that these things are complex and painful. Name-calling and crude blame have fallen from favour. Paying for sex also seems common. Again, the Mail clearly thinks it is wrong, full stop, but the law has long taken the view that, as with adultery, it should generally be regarded as a matter between consenting adults.
The Mail is obviously entitled to express its distaste for adultery and prostitution, but disapproving of something doesn’t automatically confer a right to breach the privacy of people who do it. If the paper could show that exposure was in the public interest, then perhaps. Are any of these people engaged in public moral judgement, telling others how to behave? I don’t know, but that might be an argument. Can any of these people be shown to have failed in some public duty as a result of their relationships? That too might be an argument.
Glover tells us the footballers are role models. In other words, because they play football for high salaries, these people can have no privacy in the bedroom. By extension, then, they have no entitlement to privacy at all; their entire lives — money matters, friendships, families, pastimes, tastes, opinions, holidays — are public property, to be scrutinised at any time to ensure they always set a good example. That is a difficult case to sustain.
Other people are involved in these stories and it is clear that in some cases they don’t want privacy; they want to tell their stories. That certainly complicates matters and it is hard to see an alternative to involving judges, since no privacy law is ever going to lay down rules that cover every eventuality. If judges feel the need for elaborate rulings, as the Mail complains, my guess is that this is often because they know the elaborate lengths to which newspapers will go to subvert them.
Which brings us to what is in it for newspapers. Partly, of course, (mainly, I would suggest) they want these stories because sexual scandal sells. That is why they will devote page after page to the detail of activities they claim to deprecate.
But the Mail argues on a higher plane. It says the sex lives of errant footballers and television presenters need to be exposed as a warning to the rest of us. As Glover put it: “The point is that fear of shame or disgrace acts as a restraint on all sorts of wrongdoing.”
This is the newspaper wishing to act as a public pillory in matters of sexual morality. To put it another way, the Mail wants the right to hang the scarlet letter “A” around the necks of those it considers adulterers because, it says, this will deter others from straying.
Glover’s boss, editor Paul Dacre, made the same case more fully in a speech in 2008, mainly with reference to the Max Mosley case.
Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens — rich and poor –– adhere to them for the good of the greater community. For hundreds of years, the press has played a role in that process. It has the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency – the very standards its readers believe in – and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation. If their readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such huge numbers.
What do you think of that?
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and tweets at @BrianCathcart
16 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
When the Guardian’s director of editorial legal services, Gillian Phillips, spoke at an industry conference 12 months ago, there were no written judgments on privacy injunctions apart from Terry. Since then the field has developed significantly, giving Phillips plenty to draw on, for a talk about the rise of the “super injunction”, at this year’s IBC Legal Defamation & Privacy event.
They may have first entered British public consciousness when Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger drew attention to “so-called super injunctions” in 2009, but the first order Phillips found in their files that “looked super injunctiony-ish” originated in March 2007. Schillings had served a privacy injunction for Britney Spears, against two newspaper groups.
Britney Spears was probably the start of a gradual change in the way these injunctions were obtained, Phillips said. The next significant one was granted in November 2007 for Northern Rock against the Financial Times. But there was still no “super” element, ie. a ban preventing reports of its existence.
May 2008 saw an anonymous set of initials, but as far as Phillips could tell it wasn’t a super injunction because it didn’t prevent mention of the order. However, it was against persons unknown, which became “a bit of a trait” because it meant no one was there to argue the other side.
Phillips’ first anonymous super injunction came about in February 2009, which included prevention of reporting the proceedings. For legal reasons, she couldn’t say much more.
Then came Trafigura, Terry and many more. In her overview, Phillips described the basic principle of open justice.
“Every time the court anonymises or holds something in private, makes an order saying you can’t report it, all those things are derogations from that fundamental principle.
“There is no doubt that those derogations can only be made where they’re strictly necessary. For a long time, the courts seem to have forgotten that and the claimants and those representing them seemed to have forgotten that and these things were effectively going through on a rubber stamping exercise.”
Where next? Phillips flagged up Mr Justice Eady’s comments in a speech in November 2009 in which he foresaw the possible development of a general tort of reputation, where the public interest becomes the overall guiding principle and the fact that something is true does not necessarily amount to a defence [PDF link]. “Alarm bells [are] ringing for all of us,” she added.
Looking to Europe, Max Mosley still awaits the judgment on his application for prior notification. A second Von Hannover case is currently going through the European Court of Human Rights, which raises a number of issues about privacy and the relationship with defamation.
The super injunction committee, formed by the Master of the Rolls, and made up of claimant solicitors and in-house media defendants, as well as members of the judiciary and counsel, is in the process of preparing a Report, Guidance and a draft pro-forma order. The body is still meeting, but is hopeful of producing a final report before Easter.
In the meantime there are three “‘super injunction type” cases due before the court of appeal in the next few months, WER, KGM and WXY, which might provide “a bit more light coming out of the tunnel”.
