Meghan Markle and the trouble with human rights law

Meghan Markle hailed her victory in a high court privacy case as a ‘comprehensive win’ over the Mail on Sunday’s ‘illegal and dehumanising practices’. But is that right? If you dig beneath the headlines and read the judge’s ruling, it becomes clear that her victory has much to do with a burgeoning expansion of privacy rights based on human rights law. This change in the law has taken place with little fanfare and the victim – the press – generate little sympathy. Yet it is something that should worry any supporter of free speech.

Until about twenty years ago, the English courts were pretty robust about celebrities’ privacy suits, then known as actions for breach of confidence. A typical example was a 1977 episode where a well-known pop group indignantly sought to stop the Daily Mirror spilling the beans about their private high jinks. A Court of Appeal judge tersely told them that even if someone was breaking confidence, high-living celebrities like them who sought the limelight and courted good publicity could not generally complain if someone publicised less complimentary facts about them.