Strasbourg, France (AHN) – The European Court of Human Rights rejected a bid by a known car racer to limit news on celebrity indiscretions.
The ruling comes at a time that bloggers are circumventing super injunctions issued by British courts in favor of celebrities by posting a list of notorious celebrities on Twitter.
The ECHR decision is an offshoot of a case filed by Max Mosley, former president of the governing body of Formula One auto racing. Mosley asked the court to require news organizations to inform the subjects of their article before publishing stories about celebrity indiscretions.
Mosley filed the lawsuit because of a 2008 article in the British tabloid “The News of the World” which bannered a story about him having a Nazi orgy with five prostitutes, based on a video shot secretly by one of the orgy participants.
Mosley said the newspaper did not check the story with him prior to publication. A British court favored Mosley and fined the paper almost $100,000 (GBP 60,000) because the story failed to provide evidence of Nazi behavior in the orgy.
But the ECHR rejected Mosley’s claim that British media law breached the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to protect him from intrusion into his private life. The court said Britain has sufficient privacy protection laws in place. Mosley plans to appeal the court’s decision to the Grand Chamber.
Celebrities often resorted to court orders to secure injunctions against publications that run stories on extramarital affairs or sexual liaisons of public orders. The injunctions even prohibit media from reporting the issuance of the court gag order.
But even British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted that technology and social media networking sites such as Twitter are making a mockery of the country’s privacy laws. However, Hunt agreed with an earlier comment by British Prime Minister David Cameron that it should be the parliament who will decide where to draw the line on the country’s privacy law, not the courts.
Hunt said he would discuss a review of the country’s regulatory environment with Minister of Justice Ken Clarke.
Zac Goldsmith, a Tory MP who secured a gag order, spoke in favor of super injunctions because of the alleged failure of newspapers to distinguish between public interest and prurient interest to some members of the public.
Goldsmith favored a new privacy law that would allow media to perform its duty without fear, but would protect people’s privacy, unless there is a good reason to expose their indiscretions. He admitted the super injunctions were overreaction from celebrities.
No comments:
Post a Comment