Carl Gardner writes:
As I think readers will surely know by now, John Hemming MP used Parliamentary privilege today to name the footballer whose anonymity is protected in this privacy case by an injunction, which the High Court decided earlier today to maintain in force.
[…]
There’s nothing wrong with the privacy law Parliament enacted in the Human Rights Act 1998, and which the judges are loyally applying – except that redtop newspapers want to breach and destroy it in their own commercial interests, and that many internet users have allowed themselves to be persuaded to flout it by a one-sided, self-serving and ill-informed media onslaught. I find it astonishing that, against the background of the News of The World phone hacking scandal, so many people swallow the claim that it’s judges who are out of control. As Alastair Campbell has implied in what he’s tweeted, what’s happened today is no victory for free speech, but for the worst of British journalism.
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