Overview

Has privacy law gone too far? It’s not just the editor of The Daily Mail who thinks so. Prime Minister David Cameron has said he is “uneasy” about judges “creating a sort of privacy law” and Andrew Marr is perhaps the first (and probably the last) privacy claimant to express embarrassment over his own injunction.

It is at best a half truth for Cameron to suggest that it is judges, not Parliament, that are making the law. The principal driver of the cause of action now known as misuse of private information is the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). That statute incorporated into UK law article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines a person’s right to “private and family life”.

Reynolds Porter Chamberlain’s article looks at the rise of judicially-enforced privacy.

To read more, click View Briefing.