Who, even a week ago, could have predicted a constitutional crisis between parliament and courts provoked by a footballer who played away? Within an hour of a judge refusing to lift an injunction barring the naming of the sportsman at the heart of an anonymous privacy injunction, a Liberal Democrat backbencher, John Hemming, stood up in the Commons chamber yesterday and named Manchester United's Ryan Giggs as the mystery claimant. Then, last night, the high court refused to overturn the now undermined injunction.
The case is, on the face of it, not a terribly attractive one for arguing either the cause of freedom of speech or for the supremacy of parliament. According to the original judgment, the matter involved a strong suggestion of blackmail by the former Big Brother star, Imogen Thomas, who had been trying to persuade Giggs to pay her to keep quiet about a relationship the two were alleged to have had. Ms Thomas had engaged the publicist Max Clifford to sell her story. In March Ms Thomas arranged a meeting in a hotel – very likely a "setup" so that photos could be taken – and demanded £50,000. When Giggs agreed to pay some cash, the silence money doubled to £100,000. This is hardly the stuff of Wilkes, Paine or Cobbett.
Some will disagree with the judge's decision to grant Giggs an injunction, but Mr Justice Eady's ruling can hardly be viewed as completely irrational. He was doing what parliament had asked the courts to do when it passed the Human Rights Act: to weigh up privacy and freedom of expression as embodied in articles 8 and 10 of the HRA. As required by section 12 of the act (at the urging of the press itself), judges must pay special regard to the media's own codes of conduct. The Press Complaints Commission's code guarantees exactly the same rights to privacy as the European convention and the HRA, unless there is a clear public interest in intrusion. The "public interest" includes the exposure of crime or misdemeanours. It's not obvious that an errant footballer clears that hurdle. So Mr Hemming's decision to pitch parliamentary privilege against the courts over this of all cases looks plain frivolous.
Privacy: the high politics of low gossip - The Guardian
The case is, on the face of it, not a terribly attractive one for arguing either the cause of freedom of speech or for the supremacy of parliament. According to the original judgment, the matter involved a strong suggestion of blackmail by the former Big Brother star, Imogen Thomas, who had been trying to persuade Giggs to pay her to keep quiet about a relationship the two were alleged to have had. Ms Thomas had engaged the publicist Max Clifford to sell her story. In March Ms Thomas arranged a meeting in a hotel – very likely a "setup" so that photos could be taken – and demanded £50,000. When Giggs agreed to pay some cash, the silence money doubled to £100,000. This is hardly the stuff of Wilkes, Paine or Cobbett.
Some will disagree with the judge's decision to grant Giggs an injunction, but Mr Justice Eady's ruling can hardly be viewed as completely irrational. He was doing what parliament had asked the courts to do when it passed the Human Rights Act: to weigh up privacy and freedom of expression as embodied in articles 8 and 10 of the HRA. As required by section 12 of the act (at the urging of the press itself), judges must pay special regard to the media's own codes of conduct. The Press Complaints Commission's code guarantees exactly the same rights to privacy as the European convention and the HRA, unless there is a clear public interest in intrusion. The "public interest" includes the exposure of crime or misdemeanours. It's not obvious that an errant footballer clears that hurdle. So Mr Hemming's decision to pitch parliamentary privilege against the courts over this of all cases looks plain frivolous.
Privacy: the high politics of low gossip - The Guardian
