Privacy and the Press

"Yes, the problem is that only book that you might call accessible to the general reader – anybody who’s just interested in finding out what its all about – is Joshua Rosenberg’s book. The others are rather heavy and complex, either legal or academic tomes. The other difficulty is – a common problem with law books – someone may well come out with a decision tomorrow that promptly overrides it all. Privacy law is changing very rapidly in this country at the moment. There aren’t actually many cases, but every time there is there’s a new approach to it. Its not called privacy law as such, but rather ‘misuse of private information’. It’s all based on Article 8 of the European Conventional of Human Rights, as interpreted by the Court of Strasbourg. The problem is the balance that is being struck by our courts and how it’s changing our laws. It is changing our law in a way that has not been considered by parliament. Well you could argue that, judge-made law develops according to changing situations."