Children's rights should outweigh almost all cases of public interest in newspaper stories, Court of Appeal says

The court has said that it will overturn a High Court judge's ruling and will prevent the News of the World (NotW) from revealing the name of a married male celebrity involved in a sexual affair.

"I have come to the firm conclusion that the judge erred and that this is a case where it is more likely than not that an injunction would be granted following a trial. In my judgment the appeal should be allowed and interlocutory injunctions granted in the terms sought," Lord Justice Ward said.

Interlocutory injunctions are given by the court to ban people from revealing information for an interim period of time.

The NotW learned that the woman involved in the affair, who is also married, had worked with the celebrity and left her job a year after the affair ended. The NotW wanted to report that the real reason she left her job was because of her involvement in the affair, the court said.

The NotW wanted to print details of the story in March until the celebrity asked for a High Court order banning the publication of his identity and that of his mistress, along with details of the affair, the court said.

The judge, who heard the trial in private on a Saturday, dismissed the request and the right to appeal the decision, but prevented the NotW from publishing the story the next day and granted permission for a hearing on the right to appeal.

Lord Justices Ward, Laws and Moore-Bick all agreed in that hearing that the High Court judge had been wrong and granted an appeal. Securing the anonymity of the male celebrity and the mistress, who both work in the entertainment industry, was crucial because revealing their names would adversely affect the celebrity's teenage children, the judges said.

"The purpose of the injunction is both to preserve the stability of the family while the appellant and his wife pursue a reconciliation and to save the children the ordeal of playground ridicule when that would inevitably follow publicity. They are bound to be harmed by immediate publicity, both because it would undermine the family as a whole and because the playground is a cruel place where the bullies feed on personal discomfort and embarrassment," the judges said.

The court considered the rights of the press to publish freely, citing a section of the European Convention of Human Rights (the Convention) that says that everyone has the right to freedom of expression. The judges balanced the newspaper's right and the public interest in reading the news, and weighed it against another section of the Convention protecting a person's right to privacy.

The judges agreed with the High Court judge's assessment that freedom of expression was more important than the male celebrity's right to privacy, but disagreed with the judge's ruling on how children's rights would affect that balance of the rights.

"I cannot agree that the harmful effect on the children cannot tip the balance where the adverse publicity arises because of the way the children's father has behaved," Lord Justice Ward said.
The judges said that their decision had also been based on other provisions for children under international law and cited a section of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that supported their opinion.

"In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration," the UNCRC states.

The rights of children would not be of the most importance in every case though, the judges said.
"Where a tangible and objective public interest tends to favour publication, the balance may be difficult to strike. The force of the public interest will be highly material, and the interests of affected children cannot be treated as a trump card," they said.

The reasons why the celebrity's mistress left her job were not of sufficient public interest to outweigh the rights of the children involved in this case, the judges said.

"The decisive factor is the contribution the published information will make to a debate of general interest. Is a debate about the reasons why [the woman's] employment terminated a matter of such public interest? ... The reasons for her leaving may interest some members of the public but the matters are not of public interest. Publication may satisfy public prurience but that is not a sufficient justification for interfering with the private rights of those involved," the judges said.

The judges said it was their opinion that appeal court would ban the NotW from publishing the story. The result of the appeal has not yet been published.

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