Langues appliquées - Anglais : Economie, gestion, droit, AES - 4e - 236

law

Instructions For Study
1. Turn to the definitions following the text Freedom of Expression and the Right to Privacy.
They refer to the specialist terms printed in bold type in the list of Useful words and
concepts.
2. Use an English language dictionary to find the meanings (in context) of the other words in
the list.
3. Do the exercises to test your language skills.

Freedom of Expression
and the Right to Privacy
Supreme Court Justices have prohibited publishers in England and Wales from disclosing the
identity of a male celebrity who reportedly engaged in an extra-marital sexual encounter with two
other people, despite details of the scandal being widely available on the Internet.
In a majority decision, four of the five Supreme Court Justices said that the privacy rights of
the celebrity and his family outweighed the freedom of expression rights claimed by News Group
Newspapers in the case. It ruled that the celebrity is likely to win a permanent injunction barring the
newspapers from publishing the story at a full trial in the case and, as a result, an interim injunction
should be reinstated in the meantime. The Supreme Court's ruling overturns the judgment of the Court
of Appeal in the case last month. The Court of Appeal had determined that the interim injunction
should be lifted and cited the fact that the identity of the celebrity had been reported by publications
in the US, Canada and Scotland and then subsequently repeated online as factors behind its decision.
The celebrity appealed that decision to the Supreme Court and the interim injunction remained in
place while the Court considered the case.
Media law expert Imogen Allen-Back of Pinsent Masons said: "This was a really difficult case
for the Supreme Court. Often it deals with cases which involve difficult or novel points of law, but in
this case it was being asked to decide whether the practical reality was that the information about the
celebrity had become so widely known that reinstating the injunction would have been futile. The
decision to reinstate it acknowledges that an injunction serves another function, namely to prevent
intrusion into an individual's private life in circumstances where the courts have held that there is no
public interest justification in publishing information about which that individual has a reasonable
expectation of privacy. Regardless of whether the information is accessible to some degree, the
injunction operates to protect further intrusion within the jurisdiction. The law will continue to grapple
with the global nature of information, which is difficult to contain within territorial or jurisdictional
boundaries. It seems highly likely that this type of issue will be back before the courts soon," she said.
The Supreme Court overturned the earlier ruling after determining that the Court of Appeal had
made errors of law in coming to its judgment. In his leading judgment Lord Mance said that the Court
of Appeal had overemphasised the weight to be given to freedom of expression considerations and
instead stressed that arguments relating to the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy
have to be considered from the starting point that both rights are equal. Both the right to privacy and
to freedom of expression are qualified under the European Convention on Human Rights, which is
enshrined in UK law in the Human Rights Act. Where there is a conflict between freedom of expression
and privacy rights there needs to be "an intense focus on the comparative importance of the rights
being claimed in the individual case", and "the justifications for interfering with or restricting each
right must be taken into account", Lord Mance said. A "proportionality test" must also be applied to
each right, he said.

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