MAXINE CARR’S groundbreaking order makes her one of the most invisible criminals in Britain. It also marks a further step towards what some lawyers see as a new privacy law by stealth that protects high-profile criminals from media exposure.

For the first time a convicted adult who has not committed murder has won an indefinite anonymity order barring any media comment on her identity, whereabouts, care or treatment. Mr Justice Eady said that the order was necessary to protect “life and limb” and the psychological health of Carr.

But it is the latest and most far-reaching in a series of such injunctions. In 2003 the privacy of Mary Bell, who killed two boys when she was 11, was protected by an order by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. But it was specifically to protect the privacy of her daughter, whose life could have been destroyed by her mother’s exposure as a child-killer.

In 2001 lifelong anonymity was granted to two other child-killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, on reaching maturity. The pair were convicted of the killing of the toddler James Bulger. But the difference between their order and that of Carr is that Thompson and Venables were first given protection as juveniles: to remove the order when they reached 18 would have been to expose them suddenly to serious harm and to destroy the benefit of their rehabilitation while in custody.

Second, their offence was one of the worst on the criminal scale. Carr’s, by comparison, was minor: she provided a false alibi for Ian Huntley by lying to police about her whereabouts at the time the ten-year-old girls were killed.

So far all the cases that have attracted such orders have been exceptional. The danger, lawyers say, is that each time they have been a little less exceptional and the boundaries of freedom of expresssion pushed back a little more.

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