Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Professor Brian Cathcart—Written evidence
16. The committee will know that these principles are already well established in the case
law arising from the Human Rights Act.
Should Parliament enact a new privacy law?
17. As we have seen, the mass-circulation press has campaigned with one voice against the
present legal arrangements on privacy. This cannot be described as a disinterested campaign,
because whatever else they are doing they are striving to protect practices of privacy
intrusion which have historically helped them to sell papers. The loftier opinions of
proprietors, editors and columnists may be sincerely held, but these organisations, when
they address their readers on privacy, have a financial interest which they very rarely
declare.
18. The question about a new law thus arises, so far as there is evidence to judge, not in the
first instance because of a deep-seated or widely felt public unease about the operation of
the existing law, but because of a campaign by a group with a strong vested interest and
unique powers to exert pressure. Those powers have been used in the most aggressive
fashion. Where privacy is concerned, judges are always bigoted; politicians are always
corrupt; the famous are always unsavoury hypocrites and the rich are always sinister and allpowerful.
Details from the available information are cherry-picked to support these views
and contrary information is ignored.
19. This crude polarisation of the argument -- newspapers plus public versus corrupt
establishment -- may well be the opposite of the truth. By attacking the law, the courts, the
judges and, at least indirectly, Parliament itself, newspapers could be said to be jeopardising
the rights of ordinary citizens in pursuit of a cause in which they have a strong but rarely
acknowledged financial interest.
What arguments are put forward against the present law?
20. It shields the lifestyles of the powerful and rich from public scrutiny. The law, as written,
protects all citizens and makes no distinction between rich and poor, famous and obscure. It
is the newspapers which make that distinction. With some often tragic exceptions, they
have no interest in the private lives of the poor and obscure, but they wish to know
everything possible about the rich, famous and powerful.
21. This divisiveness is assisted, it must be said, by our glaringly unequal arrangements for
access to justice, which leave even the moderately wealthy with little chance of redress not
only in privacy matters but across the law. The erosion of legal aid and of Conditional Fee
Arrangements will tend to make this worse, but the papers which complain that there is
“one law for the rich” in privacy cases have never chosen to make a general cause of “one
law for all” -- indeed they tend to oppose the whole idea of CFAs.
22. It is European and not British-made, so reflecting alien traditions. The profoundly British
character of the European Convention on Human Rights is well known, even if it is rarely
mentioned in the press. No country contributed more to the creation and drafting of the
Convention, which was in considerable measure an attempt to export British values to a
continent whose moral systems had been wrecked by Nazism. One might expect this to be
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