Earlier this month, Bloomberg News lost a landmark privacy case in the UK Supreme Court, the result being that it will now be more difficult for news organisations to publish information about individuals who are subject to a criminal investigation.
In this case, Bloomberg had published an article in which an American business executive who was facing a criminal inquiry by a British regulator was named. Bloomberg had gathered the information from a confidential letter it had obtained which listed the businessman’s name and claimed that the company had been involved in bribery and corruption in another country. As a result of the publication, the businessman brought a case against Bloomberg, claiming that they had misused his private information as no criminal charges had been brought against him.
The Court ultimately sided with the claimant, and concluded that, until charged, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
This is just one in a long line of cases that pit the right of privacy against the right to freedom of expression, with Courts consistently seeming to side with the former. Back in 2004, the House of Lords laid down in Cambell v. Mirror Group Newspapers the principle that in certain settings people have reasonable expectations of privacy but that the free press does have a journalistic margin of appreciation with regard to information in the public interest which, on the facts of the case (the paper published photos of Naomi Campbell leaving a meeting for drug addicts after she had publicly stated she didn’t take drugs) had been overstepped.
The Court also found the press to have overstepped the mark in the case of ERY v. Associated Newspapers Ltd in 2016, where a newspaper had publicised the details of a businessman that had been questioned by the police while under caution. Further, in 2018 Cliff Richard successfully took the BBC to court and won substantial damages after the organisation publicised that he was involved in a policy inquiry into historical sexual offences, and Meghan Markle has recently sued the publisher of the Mail on Sunday following the publication of a private letter sent to her father.
Whilst this recent case is seen by many as a win for privacy, others argue that it is just another barrier preventing the media from reporting on criminal investigations, something that many believe is an important public task.
You can read the full case summary here.