Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

David Price QC, Gavin Millar QC, Gillian Phillips, solicitor, Director of Editorial Legal
Services ,The Guardian, and Reynolds Porter Chamberlain—Oral evidence (QQ 33–64)
Strasbourg for the balance between Articles 8 and 10. Our fantastic democratic tradition
has gone to a series of countries—I made this submission to the Court of Appeal and they
had a go at me—in eastern Europe none of which, frankly, has any tradition of freedom of
expression. They referred to it as an American fetish. They do not have our robust
tradition of challenging authority and have a culture of deference. That is what you are up
against.
Q841 Lord Thomas of Gresford: You should be voting in the European debate.
David Price: Indeed; I should be outside with my placard this afternoon. It is not the
European principle with which I have a problem. My problem is with the fact that the
Strasbourg court has interpreted a right to privacy, which originally was to prevent
jackboots kicking down your door, into something that restrains people from expressing
their life experiences; it restricts freedom of expression and is interpreted in a way that I do
not believe it should ever be interpreted. That is what you are stuck with as long as you
have the obligation under the Human Rights Act to take into account Strasbourg
jurisprudence.
Q842 Yasmin Qureshi: You talk about the Human Rights Act being problematic,
but we have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is a treaty
obligation. The Human Rights Act is only embodying the convention into our domestic
system.
David Price: But do not take into account how Strasbourg interprets it. If you have
to keep the European Convention on Human Rights, do not make the Strasbourg court
effectively dictate how it should be interpreted.
Gavin Millar: I think the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, was right the other day
when he said that the Act just obliges us to take into account those decisions. This is an
important point. There is a margin of appreciation. We can develop a characteristic law of
freedom of speech and privacy in this country without worrying too much about Strasbourg
judges. I think you have to be rather subtle about it. I have a lot of sympathy with David’s
view that we should get into the TARDIS and go back 10 or 20 years, but it ain’t going to
happen. Unless we are to come out of the convention, we have our international law
obligations, so I am afraid we must be much more subtle.
Chairman: We are straying into a much bigger issue than privacy, obviously, which I
suspect may occupy Parliament in future.
Q843 Lord Dobbs: I shall try to offer a very brief answer to a simple question in
order to ask a second question thereafter. We talked earlier about how since the public
frenzy over injunctions in the case of Rio Ferdinand, other footballers and so forth—I was
going to call it a media frenzy, but that would be very impolite of me—the number of
injunctions has not only fallen but almost seems to have disappeared in this area. Is this
because our legal system has managed to gain some sort of balance between these
conflicting interests, or is it simply another calm before the next storm?
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