Judge in Douglas case calls for a privacy law

Celebrties need protection from the intrusive behaviour of the tabloid press, one of the judges in the Michael Douglas privacy case said yesterday.

Lord Justice Sedley said that the threat to privacy from the "secret policeman"of post-war Europe had now been "supplanted" by the actions of the tabloid journalist.

In a Legal Action Group lecture in London last night on the future of the Human Rights Act, the Court of Appeal judge said that the courts were guilty of "hesitancy" in failing to develop a law of privacy in this country. He said the recent publication of a story about the Premiership footballer Gary Flitcroft was "highly invasive ... amounting to little more than soft pornography."

He said British judges had failed to follow the lead of the Germans and the French in developing a balance between the rights of celebrities "to a bit of peace and the rights of the journalists to tell all".

The High Court ruled in April that the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones was private and that Hello! had acted "unconscionably" by publishing snatched photographs of the couple without their permission. But it did not uphold a freestanding right to privacy.