Confidence revived

Newspapers must not publish private diaries in which the Prince of Wales described Chinese leaders at the hand over of Hong Kong in 1997 as “appalling old waxworks”, the Court of Appeal ruled today.
Three of England’s most senior judges dismissed an appeal by Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Mail on Sunday, against an earlier ruling granting the prince summary judgment without the need for a full trial.
Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, sitting with the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice May, said that a High Court judge had been correct when he decided in March that Prince Charles had “an unanswerable claim for breach of privacy”.
When the breach of a confidential relationship was added to the balance, Lord Phillips continued, the prince’s case was “overwhelming”.
The Prince of Wales had sued the newspaper over eight hand-written journals recording his impressions of overseas tours made between 1993 and 1999. Typed copies of the journals were supplied to the Mail on Sunday by a former employee in the prince’s private office, Sarah Goodall, and substantial extracts from one of the diaries were published in November last year.
Instead of deciding the claim under the emerging law of privacy, the Court of Appeal approached the case under the old law of confidence from which privacy has developed. Ms Goodall, the judges said, had been under a contractual duty to keep the diaries confidential.
The newspaper argued that Prince Charles had circulated copies of his journals to between 50 and 75 people. In addition, the prince had used the media to publicise views of a similar kind to those in his journals. On that basis, the publishers claimed, he could not reasonably expect their contents to remain confidential.
The judges disagreed. The test, they said, was not whether the information was a matter of public interest but whether, in all the circumstances, it was in the public interest that the duty of confidence should be breached.
“As heir to the throne, Prince Charles is an important public figure,” Lord Phillips said. “In respect of such persons, the public takes an interest in information about them that is relatively trivial. For this reason, public disclosure of such information can be particularly intrusive.”
There was a “strong public interest” in preserving the confidentiality of communications within private offices. The significance of the interference with the prince’s right to privacy under Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention outweighed the significance of the newspaper’s right to freedom of expression under Article 10.
A spokesman for the Mail on Sunday said after the ruling that the judgment represented “a very worrying threat to freedom of the press and to the public’s right to know”.
The newspaper said: “Reporting the contents of leaked documents has always been one of the most important means by which the media reveals the truth about public affairs, and it would be highly damaging if this were to be prohibited by the courts.”

Posted at December 21, 2006 03:30 PM