Sir, Paul Dacre’s isolation of Mr Justice Eady for public attack (“Judge has created privacy law by back door, says Mail editor”, Times Online, Nov 10) cannot stand unanswered, not least because, by convention, the judge is unable to respond publicly to such criticism.

The suggestion that Mr Justice Eady is conducting a one-man mission to create a law of privacy, thereby circumventing the function of Parliament, does not bear proper examination.

Firstly, the Judge was applying the law as Parliament intended. The Human Rights Act requires the English courts to recognise European Convention rights, including the right to respect for private and family life. Indeed, Parliament expressly made it unlawful for a court to act in a way which is incompatible with a Convention right. The task of the Court is to resolve the tension between personal privacy and freedom of expression, an area where there are no absolutes. In weighing these rights the public interest will always ensure that the corrupt and crooked will not “sleep easily in their beds”. Mr Dacre may well prefer an era when freedom of expression did not have to take account of privacy rights, but Parliament has decided the contrary.

Secondly, the decisions of Mr Justice Eady (like those of the many trial judges who have decided privacy cases) are subject to three levels of review: the Court of Appeal, the House of Lords and ultimately the European Court of Human Rights. In the cases cited by Mr Dacre, the Judge was doing no more than applying the law, as he was bound to do, developed by the House of Lords in the Naomi Campbell case and the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Princess Caroline. It is significant that there was no appeal against the decision in the cuckolded husband case, nor was there an appeal against the Mosley judgment. In Lord Browne’s case, the Mail on Sunday did not challenge in the Court of Appeal that limb of the injunction granted by Mr Justice Eady about which Mr Dacre now complains. Similarly, the Court of Appeal paid tribute to the Judge’s reasoning when upholding his decision in McKennitt v Ash.

The suggestion that the judge wishes to suppress the media’s freedom of expression is not borne out by his record. To give just two examples, Mr Justice Eady has been mainly responsible for the recent reinvigoration of the law of fair comment, one of the principal protections of that freedom.

Ironically, in the Lowe case, the newspaper defendant was one of the Mail group titles of which Mr Dacre is Editor-in-Chief. The Judge was also the architect and has been a resolute promoter of the statutory offer of amends procedure. This has been very widely adopted by media defendants as a means to settle libel complaints speedily and economically.

Desmond Browne, QC

Andrew Caldecott, QC

Adrienne Page, QC

Richard Rampton, QC

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