Thinks…

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has expressed an opinion on super-injunctions, libel and privacy… This while strolling through a car factory in Luton. Specifically, he says that he feels “uneasy” about judges making decisions in court on issues of privacy that ought really to be decided by our elected representatives in Parliament.

Veterans among you will know that I don’t agree with this view, even though I have strongly opposed several of Mr Justice Eady’s decisions, crucially in McKennitt v. Ash. The reason I don’t agree is that Parliament has already decided on privacy issues by voting to make the European Convention on Human Rights part of British law. Once that happened, it was up to judges in court to make decisions applying ECHR in a British context, bearing in mind case law, common law, and all the rest of it.

The problem, as I’ve always seen it, is that Mr Justice Eady – specifically – got the balance completely wrong between the ECHR’s Article 8 (privacy) and Article 10 (freedom of expression) in McKennitt v. Ash, as well as several other cases, most glaringly perhaps in Mosley.

[For further rants about this, see McKennitt v. Ash archives on the right]