Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Richard Caseby, Group Managing Editor, News Group Newspapers, Dominic Mohan, editor,
The Sun, and Justin Walford, Editorial Legal Counsel, News Group Newspapers—Oral
evidence (QQ 1511–1593)
Q1513 Lord Thomas of Gresford: That answer suggests that you find a different
public interest definition when you are working for The Sunday Times from when you are
working for The Sun.
Richard Caseby: No, it is not the definition; it is the type of stories you are
producing.
Q1514 Lord Thomas of Gresford: You are applying the same standard, are you,
but just to different stories?
Richard Caseby: You might look at public interest as defined by the PCC code in
terms of hypocrisy. Unless you are talking in The Sunday Times about a high-profile
businessman who has been hypocritical in his dealings, it does not feature so much. Usually
with investigations in The Sunday Times you are looking at criminal wrongdoing or something
like that.
Whereas on The Sun you might look at footballers or celebrities who take a
hypocritical stand. I recall one case, which you might have already heard about—that of Rio
Ferdinand. Rio Ferdinand, a married man, had a long-term affair over many years, and he
sought an injunction to stop that being reported. He lost that injunction on a number of
features; one of them was that at the time he was captain of the England football team. Was
he held to be a role model? Yes, he was, because Capello had already sacked an England
captain for misbehaviour with another woman.
At the same time, in an interview in The News of the World, Ferdinand had talked
about how happy he was in his family life. On his Twitter feed, where he has about 1.5
million followers, he had also talked about his happy family life. The judge thought he was
hypocritical and he did not win his injunction. One does not usually come across such
stories and considerations at The Sunday Times.
Justin Walford: May I pick up the point that you raised about statute? I suppose one
can separate out the issues. First, would one have a statute on privacy? Secondly, would you
have a statutory definition of public interest? My feeling is that we are always going to end up
with the courts having, as they have quite rightly said, an intense focus on the particular facts
of the case. There is a difficulty in privacy cases, as opposed to a libel case, where it is
perhaps easier to identify the issue of what is being said and its meaning and, following on
from that, what the evidence is—hopefully there is some—to justify the article being
written. One of the difficulties of privacy is that there are so many grey areas. What is
private in the first place? What is a reasonable expectation of privacy? Then when one
comes to public interest issues, if one can say this, can one say that? Can you use this
picture? Is this material going too far? Those are issues that seem to me to be legal issues
that will have to be assessed in a court. A court is the right place.
Q1515 Lord Janvrin: If that is the case—that inevitably, even if there were a new
statute, this would end up being tested in a court—why has there been such criticism of the
way in which the balance is struck between freedom of expression and the right of privacy as
judge-made law? I don’t know whether your title has expressly used that phrase, but that is
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