Court refuses 'futile' reporting restriction on paternity story

The Court ruled that the right of people involved in the news story and of newspapers to freedom of expression should win out over the subjects of the story's rights to privacy.

The High Court has refused to grant an English local authority an injunction to stop press reports covering material that is already in the public domain.

The case centred on the paternity of two month old Maisie Stedman. The Sun newspaper sparked an international outcry when it reported that Maisie's father, Alfie Patten, was only 12 years old when she was conceived. It has since been proven that Alfie is not the child's father.

East Sussex County Council had all the children in the case declared wards of court and won an injunction stopping any further press coverage of their situation. The injunction prohibited publication of the identification of Alfie as being related to Maisie.

The Daily Mirror newspaper published the story that DNA tests showed that Alfie was not the father of the baby. They said the story did not breach the court order because it did not identify Alfie as being related to Maisie, in fact it did quite the opposite.

The Council then applied for an extension to the injunction. It wanted a ban on the publication of any images of the children, and the results of DNA tests, despite the fact that these are already in the public domain.

The High Court refused the extension of the scope of the injunction, saying that the rights of the children to privacy had to be balanced with the rights to freedom of expression of newspapers covering the story, and of Alfie to tell the world that he was not, in fact, Maisie's father.

The Court rejected the argument of the Council that the interests of the children were paramount. It said that this is only the case when issues of custody are being considered. Mrs Justice Eleanor King said that the privacy interests of all the children had to be balanced against the freedom of expression interests of Alfie and the newspapers.

Both sets of rights stemmed from the European Convention on Human Rights and the UK law which implemented it, the Human Rights Act.

The Court found that the privacy rights of the children were engaged and had to be considered. It acknowledged that republication of material already in the public domain would be distressing, particularly for Maisie's mother, Chantelle Stedman.

It also said, though, that The Sun's owner, News Group Newspapers, has rights to freedom of expression which entitle it to publish details of the story. Mrs Justice King said that the Court had to be realistic about what publicity had already surrounded the case.

"I have to deal with the reality of the situation regardless of whether or not the Daily Mirror article was published lawfully," she said in her ruling. "There are not just hundreds of public domain photographs of Chantelle, Maisie and Alfie in existence, there are tens of thousands all over the world and largely on the internet."

"The Local Authority says that it is the print medium which will be particularly damaging to Chantelle and that the injunction they propose can be enforced so far as the print media is concerned. I feel unable to reach any such conclusion: print may appear to be the most immediate medium but it is a matter of public record that newspaper circulation is suffering as a consequence of the large number of (particularly younger) people reading the news online. If the fear is that it is printed stories which will render Chantelle vulnerable to abuse it should not be overlooked that young people can be every bit as cruel and thoughtless as every other age group," she said.

The Court said that it would be wrong to further restrict reporting of the case.

"I unhesitatingly, if reluctantly, conclude that even taking into account the harm to Chantelle, Alfie and Maisie which may well follow, allowing the Local Authority application to amend the Reporting Restriction order by preventing publication of the DNA test and/or of photographs and images already in the public domain would represent a disproportionate interference in the Article 10 rights of the press and of Alfie's Article 8 and Article 10 rights to rectify the erroneous information about him," said Mrs Justice King. "Not only in my judgment would it be disproportionate but it would be futile."

"In my judgment the dam … has indeed burst and in practical terms there is no longer anything which the law can protect; the granting of the injunction at the present juncture would merely be a futile gesture," she said.