Mosley loses privacy battle

Max Mosley has lost his attempt to force the media to warn people before exposing their private lives at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

The former Formula 1 head won £60,000 damages and £240,000 costs from the News of the World in 2008 after it falsely claimed there was a Nazi theme to his sado-masochistic orgy. He appealed to ECtHR, on the basis his human rights had been breached because the newspaper did not warn him of the story.

ECtHR said the conduct of the newspaper was “open to severe criticism” and that it had published additional video footage for no reason but to “titillate the public and increase the embarrassment of the applicant” (Mosley v UK [2011] ECHR 774).

However, it concluded that “having regard to the chilling effect to which a pre-notification requirement risks giving rise, to the significant doubts as to the effectiveness of any pre-notification requirement and to the wide margin of appreciation in this area, the Court is of the view that Art 8 does not require a legally binding pre-notification requirement”.

Robin Shaw, privacy and defamation partner at Davenport Lyons, said: “This is very welcome news for the media; if Mr Mosley had succeeded in his application, the law would likely have become unworkable and would have led to a wholly disproportionate interference with the right to freedom of expression.

“The obligation to give prior notification would not have been restricted to stories about the sexual behaviour of people in the public eye...It would have been ruthlessly exploited by the well-known and, their PR advisers and their lawyers, to control, by legal action and threats of subjecting the media to enormous legal costs, what was written and broadcast about them.”

Attempts by the rich and famous to gag the media have sparked controversy in recent weeks. The details of six alleged super-injunctions were posted on Twitter this week, while political journalist Andrew Marr has faced claims of hypocrisy for taking one out.