BRITISH PRIME minister David Cameron has ordered ministers to consider the preparation of a privacy law for the United Kingdom.
This follows the circulation of both accurate and false allegations on Twitter against a number of high-profile people who had taken out court super-injunctions to prevent the printing of stories about them in tabloid newspapers.
The decision came hours after the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the former head of Formula One, Max Mosley, who had urged the Strasbourg judges to impose a legal duty on newspapers to notify people before publishing details of their private lives, in order to give them time to seek a court injunction.
Such an action, the judges ruled, would have a chilling effect on press freedom. The concept of “a private life” is sufficiently well understood by British newspapers, they said, for them to know when they were about to act in a way that could infringe that right. Any notification requirement would have to make exceptions for cases that are of public interest.
The Strasbourg case was taken by Mr Moseley after he won £60,000 damages in 2008 from the News of the World, which said he had indulged in a Nazi-themed sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes in London. The orgy involving Mr Moseley – the son of the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley – did occur, but the allegations about the Nazi theme were untrue.
The justice ministry welcomed the judgment: “We are pleased with the judgment in this case and believe the court has made the right decision. The government recognises the importance of finding the right balance between individual rights to privacy on the one hand, with rights to freedom of expression and transparency of official information on the other.”
However, there is wider concern in the UK following a spate of Twitter allegations about celebrities. These included one about writer and campaigner Jemima Khan, who was falsely alleged to have had an affair with Top Gearpresenter Jeremy Clarkson, and then to have had sought an injunction to prevent the publication of photographs.
Mr Cameron has ordered culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and justice secretary Ken Clarke to examine “as a matter of urgency” the issue of whether a privacy law could be prepared and whether it could be relevant in the era of social media, which is almost impossible to regulate.
Mr Hunt said the Twitter breaches of the super-injunctions were making a mockery of court orders. “We do need to think about the regulatory environment we have. We’re in this crazy situation where information is available freely online which you are not allowed to put in newspapers.”
However, Mr Mosley said the impact of allegations carried on Twitter, which he said was only “one step up from pub gossip”, is of a different order to allegations carried in national newspapers. “If Jemima Khan had not publicised [her difficulties], it would have been seen by a very small number of people and most people would not have known it was going on,” he said.
