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The Supreme Court in MGN Limited v Gulati and others on 22 March 2016 upheld the High Court decision of Mr Justice Mann in respect of assessing damages payable to claimants who had been victim of invasion of privacy, including telephone hacking by some staff of the Daily Mirror newspaper, owned by Mirror Group Newspapers Limited (MGN) (see IRIS 2015-7/18). MGN had appealed to the Court of Appeal, contending that the damages awarded by Mr Justice Mann were excessive. The Court of Appeal’s judgment, dated 17 December 2015, dismissed MGN’s appeal on all grounds (see IRIS 2016-3/17). The Court of Appeal...

On 30 March 2016 the Court of Cassation delivered an interesting decision on the infiltration and use of a concealed camera by journalists for a television magazine programme. In its ‘Les Infiltrés’ magazine programme, the public-sector channel France 2 had broadcast an item entitled ‘À l’extrême droite du père’ (‘to the extreme right of the father’), produced by a journalist who had concealed his professional status and, using a hidden camera, had entered a number of “traditionalist” Roman Catholic establishments and associations, recording images and speech without the people concerned being...

On 12 April 2016, the European Commission launched a Public Consultation on the evaluation and review of the e-Privacy Directive (Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector, see IRIS 2002-7/10). The consultation is addressed to all relevant stakeholders from the civil society, business and public sectors. The purpose of the consultation is twofold. Section I aims to retrospectively assess the functioning of the e-Privacy Directive, which is necessary for the review announced by the European Commission in...

In a judgment of 22 March 2016 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that Portugal has violated a journalist’s right to report about the hearing in a criminal case. The ECtHR emphasised that the domestic court hearing was public and that the criminal conviction of the journalist for having broadcast unauthorised recordings of the statements of witnesses during the hearing was not necessary in a democratic society. Therefore the journalist’s conviction amounted to a breach of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). The applicant in this case was Sofia...

In finding that there had been no violation of the right to privacy and the right to reputation, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) upheld a high level of freedom of expression in a case concerning a joke in a TV-programme about the sexual orientation of a television celebrity in Portugal. For the ECtHR it was important that the domestic courts, in dismissing the defamation complaint by Mr Sousa Goucha, took into account the context in which the joke had been made, and referred to the playful and irreverent style of the television comedy show and its usual humour. It also noted that Mr...