Latest Privacy Landmarks – And The PCC Talks Tough North Of The Border
THE ambit of privacy law is in sharper focus after two High Court cases involving an oil magnate and best-selling author.
Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso, son of the Congolese President and head of that country’s oil company, failed to obtain an injunction requiring anti-corruption group Global Witness to taken down certain documents from its website.
Mr Justice Stanley Burnton said the documents – credit card statements, company information, and a contract – were not confidential and their publication was not a misuse of private information.
They had been referred to in open court in litigation in Hong Kong and widely published online and in newspaper articles such that any confidential status was gone.
The judge said there was “an obvious possible inference” that secret personal profits had been made out of oil deals, and an “important public interest” in publication of the information.
In the second case, Harry Potter author JK Rowling is heading for the Court of Appeal after Mr Justice Patten held that a privacy claim over a long-lens photograph, taken of her son, David, in a buggy in the street when he was 20-months-old, disclosed no reasonable cause of action.
It was claimed the picture, published in the Sunday Express, was a misuse of private information, and a breach confidence, privacy and Data Protection laws. But picture agency Big Pictures succeeded in having the claim struck out.
On appeal, the case may clarify the current discrepancies between the House of Lords’ approach to celebrities’ reasonable expectations of privacy in public places, as laid down in the well-known Naomi Campbell case, and the slightly more restrictive line taken by the European Court of Human Rights in the Princess Caroline of Monaco case.
Meanwhile the Press Complaints Commission has made two significant adjudications, involving Scottish newspapers.
It ruled that a report in the Strathspey and Badenock Herald breached Clause 11 of the Code by indirectly identifying the victim of a sexual offence.
The PCC decided that the level of detail, in particular the mention of a visible injury previously suffered by the victim, together with the time and place that she met the offender, would enable people in the local community to identify the victim.
There was also criticism for the Hamilton Advertiser, whose website included footage of mobile phone video of a school classroom, showing the behaviour of clearly identifiable disruptive pupils.
This first PCC ruling on website audio-visual content rejected the newspaper’s public interest argument and held the footage was an unnecessary intrusion into children’s time at school, in breach of Clause 6.
However, other newspapers’ use of obscured images from the same footage, where pupils could not be identified, found favour.
Also in the news, freelance photographer Alan Lodge is reportedly considering an appeal after being convicted of obstructing a police officer by standing between an armed officer and an incident in Nottingham, thereby allegedly affecting the officer’s view of the crime scene.
He received a conditional discharge and was ordered to pay costs, but insists he acted reasonably, and as any press photographer would have done. The case raises important questions about the working relationship between police and the press, including the efficacy of local protocols and agreements.
On the commercial side, businessman Terry Brannigan lost his appeal against the decision by the Office of Fair Trading that Newsquest and Johhston Press had not breached competition law in their response to the launch by Mr Brannigan of two rival newspapers in East Sussex.
Published 16/08/2007. The author of this article is Tony Jaffa
