Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Sir Christopher Meyer, Martin Moore, Julian Petley, and John Kampfner—Oral evidence
(QQ 404–444)
website—where precisely this issue has challenged the Commission. Is it just in the public
interest or because the public is interested in it? Where does private life begin and public
interest end? Those are questions that I believe do not admit of a final and definitive answer.
You can look at, say, half a dozen cases where the Commission has had to rule on
such an issue. Do not forget that a majority of the people are not editors; they are lay
members in a ratio of 10 to seven. You will see the most meticulous consideration of issues,
which very much parallels the way judges approach these matters in court. Although the
system can be open to gaming if a newspaper wanted to, the people who sit on the
Commission are not such fools and naïfs as to be deceived by this. That is why I think that,
if you have not done it already, it would be well worth looking at the summaries of some of
these cases. You can see that the arguments are very refined and have built up a substantial
and valuable jurisprudence, which, whatever happens as a result of all these committees of
inquiry, should not be thrown out. It would be an error of huge proportions to start from
scratch.
Martin Moore: That is slightly problematic, because there are quite a limited
number of adjudications. There were 18 adjudications in 2010, many on different questions.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Does it have to be adjudications? You make the old error.
Rulings are the key things.
Martin Moore: In resolved cases there is no indication as to whether the code was
breached. There is also quite a lot of inconsistency. We can take the example last year of
Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn, both of whom expressed very trenchant views in their
opinion columns based on so-called facts. Rod Liddle was found in breach of the code. He
was not allowed to express his view on those facts because the facts were wrong, whereas
Richard Littlejohn was, despite the fact that it was almost exactly the same instance. I just
use that as an example.
To come back to your question about how one starts to establish it, the
question before the Joint Committee is about whether there is a need to establish
a privacy law. I do not think there is a particular need to establish a privacy law
given the article 8 rights that already exist and the precedents being set around it.
However, there is quite a good case for Parliament at least to deliberate on the
whole question of public interest. As you have seen in many of the submissions,
there are three slightly different, but all quite decent, definitions of public interest
out there in the PCC code, the BBC guidelines and the Ofcom code. Were there
to be a clause in the Protection of Freedoms Bill, for example, again it would need
to be a principle—it could not set it out exactly—it could then be referenced in
the Bribery Act, the Official Secrets Acts and the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act, such that there were public interest defences in each of those laws.
You would then start to get journalists using that as a defence, and therefore
precedents would be established around it; you would start to build up a greater
body of case law. At the moment, there is nothing similar to that, there is not a
strong understanding of public interest within the law because there is not a body
of precedent.
Q430 The Lord Bishop of Chester: It is too ad hoc?
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