Skip to main content

ETK v News Group Newspapers Ltd. [2011] EWCA Civ 439 (19 April 2011)

The link is to this judgment on Bailii.

There are two interesting arguments in this judgment - which relates to an interim gag.

Paragraph 10.
In my judgment the appellant was reasonably entitled to expect that his colleagues would treat as confidential the information they had acquired whether from their own observation of the behaviour of the appellant and X or from tittle-tattle and gossip which larded the office conversation or from a confidential confession to a colleague. A reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities would certainly find the disclosure offensive.

This is an interesting paragraph as it implies that those people who discuss work gossip with people outside the workplace become liable to pay damages to those that the gossip relates to. I am not sure that people will like this change to the law (and/or clarification)

Paragraph 17.
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.

The UN Charter for the child is then used to justify a gag. This could, of course, apply in other circunstances.

What is happening is that privacy law has now been extended further into ordinary life.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin