Naomi Campbell: Can one angry supermodel bring the tabloids to heel?

Swapping the catwalk for the High Court, Naomi Campbell has launched a challenge that will now be followed by many similar cases. But celebrities will not have it all their own way.

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The pictures had a curiously familiar feel. The car with tinted windows. The pin-striped suit, demure hair and de rigueur dark glasses. As she entered the High Court last week, Naomi Campbell assumed the look that never goes out of fashion – the celebrity on private business.

It didn't stop the photographers, but when she took the witness stand against the Mirror Group Ms Campbell protested: "I am a model, but I am not that 24/7. I am also a human being."

Can a celebrity ever be off-duty? Given that the celebrity exploits we are most interested in are the private ones, does the public figure genuinely have a right to a private life?

Privacy is today's most desirable accessory. The issue makes the headlines almost daily. From Leo Blair's vaccinations to his big brother's university application, Prince Harry's drug-taking, J K Rowling's daughter, or the actress Amanda Holden's topless sunbathing, the number of cases where people believe their privacy has been invaded by the press is multiplying.

But it is Ms Campbell's quest for privacy that has excited the most concern. Not, it has to be said, because the photographs of her attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting last year aroused fierce compassion in legal circles, but because this is a landmark case – the first time a trial has been based primarily on a breach of privacy claim.

The problem is not new. It was Diana, Princess of Wales, who did more than anyone to highlight the tangle of regulations that guard privacy in the British media. Invasions of her privacy led to significant changes in the way the press is regulated – the Press Complaints Commission was formed, and a code of conduct was issued which upholds "respect for private and family life" and requires a strong defence of "public interest" from any newspaper planning to invade that privacy.

But now there is a new remedy at hand, one which promises restraining injunctions and hefty damages. And for the past few months a queue of well-known faces has been forming at the doors of the High Court, looking to sue under the Human Rights Act.

Britain has never had a specific privacy law, though governments have occasionally stirred themselves to threaten one. Anyone determined to gain legal redress for invasion of privacy has been obliged to sue under other laws, such as defamation, or breach of confidentiality or copyright. Naomi Campbell's action partly relies on those, too.

But the Human Rights Act, which came into force 15 months ago, brings with it a provision, under Article 8, that gives "everyone the right to respect for his private or family life, his home and his correspondence". And that includes celebrities.

In fact it means celebrities especially, as Lord Wakeham, the erstwhile chairman of the PCC points out, because only the very rich have the means to slug it out in the High Court.

The first significant step came with Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, who had sold exclusive rights to their wedding photos to OK! magazine for £600,000. When Hello! staged a classic spoiler by publishing some fuzzy undercover shots, the couple were told by a judge that they had a case for "breach of privacy".

They were followed by Anna Ford, photographed on holiday on a Majorcan beach. When her complaint was rejected by the PCC, she went to court to challenge the right of the PCC to perform as the tribunal of first resort under the Act. In the event she lost, but media lawyers are confident that the floodgates have well and truly opened.

Some fear the Act will mean more prior restraint of newspapers and endless injunctions being granted, stifling genuine investigative reporting in the process. Already most of the cases brought have been for prior-restraint injunctions which went unreported.

Some senior figures, however, claim that the reverse is true. Geoffrey Robertson QC, a specialist in media and human rights law, says the Human Rights Act has already had "a measurable liberalising effect" because some senior judges have applied Article 10, which guarantees freedom of expression, in a way that has extended public-interest reporting.

With these legal changes come cultural ones. Ask any teenager with a copy of Heat and they will say celebrities' private lives are often indistinguishable from their public ones. It is endemic. Read some actress talking about the demands of her new role and the eyes glaze over. It's only when they start on their IVF, HRT or AA that we really sit up and pay attention.

The Mirror Group seized on this point in its defence, claiming that Ms Campbell does not have the same right to privacy as "the normal man or woman in the street" who does not use the media to put forward a commercial image or "talk about very intimate areas of their lives".

"The whole problem is to do with the nature of celebrity," says Professor Eric Barendt, professor of media law at University College, London. "It's now what a celebrity does in their private life – who they're having an affair with, how their house is decorated, where they go on holiday – that makes them a matter of interest."

"The problem of privacy is difficult to define," says Louis Blom-Cooper QC, a former chairman of the old Press Council. "But that's precisely why a definition of privacy should emerge in the courts. The courts will build up a body of case law by which individual cases can be assessed."

Or as Geoffrey Robertson forecasts: "We're going to see a right of privacy gradually crystallise as this and other cases are decided. It will be a very limited right of privacy. And where it will be used to protect us is in the bedroom, the changing room, the hospital and the grave."