Some thoughts on the Mosley Case.

The decision by Mr Justice Eady to award Max Mosley £60,000 in punitive damages after successfully suing the News of the World will no doubt set the legal media world on fire over the next few days.

At the one extreme,that his Lordship has chosen to interpret the Human Rights act in a specifically individual way which will repercussions for journalists for some time.

On the other that,Justice Eady has upheld the right of every UK citizen to a private life.The ruling was that Mosley had

reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to his sexual activities no matter how "unconventional".

This centres on two things.The first being that Mosley was not considered an important enough citizen to warrant a public interest.Head of Formula 1?.I will leave you to make your own conclusions.
The second is the Nazi connection and this really was down to the News of the World's badly cobbled together defence.

Editor Colin Myler acknowledged after the ruling that

The judge has ruled that Mr Mosley's activities did not involve Nazi role-play as we had reported, but has acknowledged that the News of the World had an honest belief that a Nazi theme was involved during the orgy,"

Roy Greenslade comes down hard on the paper and lists five points in which he feels the paper acted wrongly

1. it failed to have the German dialogue in the S&M orgy translated. Why not? Potentially that might have provided better "evidence" of a Nazi theme than the English speech.

2. Myler admitted having seen little of the video himself. Surely an editor about to publish a sensational story should have concerned himself with every possible detail in advance of publication?

3. Myler expressed surprise that his reporter had failed to obtain a signed statement from Woman E before printing her story. Should he not have known that from the beginning?

4. the inbuilt, old-fashioned anti-German prejudice of the staff meant that they confused German play-acting for Nazism. To speak in German or with a German accent does not make a person a Nazi.

5. the paper failed to put any of the allegations to Mosley prior to publication. Yet there is a clear requirement for journalists to do so. (It is ironic that a couple of years ago when I wrote a story that called into question the veracity of certain NoW investigations its editor and legal department not only required that I put the allegations to the paper but demanded a right of reply).

This is why the case was lost,one feels,it is unlikely that the ruling will have a long term effect on privacy cases