A Premier League footballer has won a gagging order stopping the public learning about his affair with a team-mate’s girlfriend.
The so-called ‘super-injunction’ was granted by a High Court judge under human rights laws.
The married England international successfully claimed that exposing his infidelity would be a breach of his right to a ‘private and family life’.
So draconian is Mr Justice Tugendhat’s order that even its existence is supposed to be a secret.
This latest example of media censorship provoked fresh controversy yesterday.
A sweeping privacy law – now regularly used by sports stars to shield their lifestyles from scrutiny – has been put in place by judges without the endorsement of Parliament.
Last month, a married Premier League manager succeeded in keeping his identity out of the papers despite being spotted visiting a brothel.
Privacy guaranteed by the courts is likely to be of great financial benefit to the sportsman in the latest privacy scandal. He enjoys lucrative sponsorship deals which might be put at risk if fans were to learn of his activities.
By contrast, no privacy law binds the U.S. media and Tiger Woods has lost several highly paid deals since his serial infidelities were publicised.
Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, said: ‘We are in a position where the very rich can stop any publicity they don’t like while in many cases they are perfectly happy to milk publicity when it’s positive and benefits them.’
Mr Davies, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, which is shortly to publish a report on privacy law, added: ‘The whole situation with injunctions has gone way too far.
‘A free Press should be the corner stone of a free country and a free society and I am disturbed that injunctions are being granted willy-nilly to the wealthy and powerful.’
The enforced silence over the footballer is doubly controversial because of the use of a ‘ super-injunction’ which forbids publication of anything about it.
Such powers were brought in to defend the public interest – such as protecting the operations of criminal justice agencies in pursuing criminals.
Last autumn, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge gave as an example of the proper use of a super-injunction the case of the investigation of a fraud ring.
It was essential to keep an asset-freezing order against one member secret from the rest so that they did not dispose of their assets or flee.
Privacy law has largely been created by a single judge, Mr Justice Eady, who has taken charge of a number of key cases.
Last year he declared that Formula One chief Max Mosley had been deprived of his privacy when the News of the World claimed he took part in a Nazi-themed orgy with prostitutes.
The judge said that despite the fact that the participants wore uniforms, spoke German and used suggestive props, it was not a Nazi orgy, and so publishing the story was not in the public interest.
Parliament has never passed a law on privacy.
However, judges have built one on the back of Labour’s 1998 Human Rights Act, which made the European Convention on Human Rights part of British law.
Judges have made privacy rulings based on article 8 of the charter, which guarantees ‘respect for private and family life’.
They have given this precedence over article ten, which guarantees freedom of expression and ‘freedom to receive and impart information’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0e0RUDzTv
Would love to know who it is and which team mate's wife!
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