Towards a Right to Privacy

Stephen Sedley

There are some who will have taken a sadistic pleasure in the failure of the recent attempt by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, to prevent George Galloway from publishing photographs of him on the internet. But those who are keen to see privacy protected by law were making a mistake if they cheered or jeered at the court’s refusal to protect Mahmood from the kind of exposure to which his paper regularly subjects others. The real coup would have been if the court had accepted his counsel’s argument that the unwanted publicity violated Mahmood’s right to respect for his private life and Mahmood v. Galloway had become authority for a free-standing right of privacy.

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[*] The Information Commissioner’s present remit includes the protection of personal privacy, but it is the data controller, not the individual, whom the law requires him to treat as the victim of the unauthorised disclosures.