Ford challenges press watchdog over beach photos

The BBC newsreader Anna Ford began a legal test case on Friday, accusing the Press Complaints Commission of failing to protect her privacy from photographers.

Ms Ford is seeking permission in the High Court to challenge a PCC ruling that it was acceptable for a photographer to take long-lens pictures of her while she was sunbathing on a public beach in her bikini in Majorca. Pictures of Ms Ford and her partner, David Scott, a former American astronaut, which had been taken without their knowledge, appeared in the Daily Mail last August.

Ms Ford is the first celebrity to challenge a PCC ruling in the law courts, but other high-profile figures are taking advantage of the new Human Rights Act and dispensing with the watchdog's services.

Last month the actress Amanda Holden obtained an injunction after claiming sneak topless pictures that were published in the Daily Star had infringed her privacy. She had not asked the PCC to adjudicate on her case.

She is now seeking damages and destruction of the original photograph. Holden had been staying in a private villa with a secluded garden in Tuscany and it is claimed the photographs were taken from private land to which there was no public access, which would have been a clear breach of PCC guidelines.

The actress Catherine Zeta Jones and her husband, Michael Douglas, also shunned the PCC last year when attempting to stop Hello! magazine publishing photographs taken in secret of their wedding, this time with less success. Lord Justice Sedley observed that the couple had already sold most of the privacy they sought to protect by agreeing a deal for publication with OK! magazine. The element of privacy that remained theirs, he said, was a right to veto the OK! photographs "to maintain the kind of image which is professionally and no doubt also personally important to them".

The model Naomi Campbell is still awaiting the outcome of her court case against The Mirror, which published a photograph of her emerging from a Narcotics Anonymous clinic earlier this year. Again the case was taken straight to court.

Yesterday the PCC was playing down the importance of the Ford court case. A spokesman said: "We are happy if the judge rules that her case can be considered because the PCC is confident that it came to the right decision."

The PCC decided not to uphold her complaint against the Daily Mail on the basis that the beach where Ms Ford was sunning herself was not private and was accessible to the public.

Despite the newspaper admitting that Ms Ford was trying to adopt a low profile by "shunning her five-star hotel swimming pool in favour of secluded areas of the beach" it ruled that the pictures had not "intruded into any intimacy nor left the complainants open to ridicule" or shown "a lack of respect for their private lives".

Speaking at the time of the ruling, the PCC's chairman, Lord Wakeham, said he could not see how an individual – particularly a well-known face – has a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public beach in Majorca, at the height of the holiday season. He suggested Ms Ford's own naivety was what had led to the pictures being published.

"Most people – particularly those in the public eye – instinctively know when they might be at risk of being photographed," he said.

In court yesterday, Geoffrey Robertson QC, for Ms Ford, accused the PCC of misinterpreting its own Code of Practice. Paragraph 3 (ii) of the code stated that "the use of long- lens photography to take pictures of people in private places without their consent is unacceptable".

Mr Robertson said the PCC had "emptied of meaning" the code's definition of "private place" by deciding that a public place ceased to be a place where there was "a reasonable expectation of privacy" once the public had access to it.

The court will give its ruling at a later date.