The Ministry of Justice recently published information relating to the amount of privacy injunctions that were granted in the first 6 months of 2013. The figures show that the amount of privacy injunctions granted by the courts during this period was 6, which is double the amount granted in the preceding 6 month period.
Privacy injunctions are concerned with protecting the right afforded by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the right to respect for private and family life. This affords protection to the sort of personal and confidential information in which you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, this being that it is not published or made known to others. Such information has concerned drug rehabilitation treatment (Naomi Campbell) and wedding photographs (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas). Many privacy cases and injunctions concern celebrities who do not want certain information to be made public and published by the press as it could do irreversible damage to their reputation that could not be compensated adequately with damages (damages in privacy cases are notoriously low). Concern grew however over the number of injunctions and super–injunctions (the most secretive of proceedings; the court will not even permit publication of the fact a super-injunction has been obtained) that were being granted and hence why the Ministry of Justice monitors and publishes figures relating to this type of proceedings.
The press also have a right to publish stories and information afforded to them by the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 ECHR. This is why the court has monitored this type of proceedings because it needs to balance the rights and ensure that it is not overly censoring the press on matters that really are in the public interest and should be published.
It may well be complete coincidence that there has been a significant increase in the number of privacy injunctions granted in the last few months or it may be that the courts are falling more in favour of Article 8 than Article 10. In many of these cases access to court documents was restricted and the hearings took place in private making it very difficult to assess how the court approached the matters. It will therefore be interesting to assess the figures over the next 6-12 months to see if the trend towards granting privacy injunctions continues to rise.
