The love rat and a crucial boost for press freedom

The timing could not have been more appropriate. As the luminaries of the British press, including Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and 40 past or present national newspaper editors, were assembled in St Bride's on Monday to celebrate 300 years of Fleet Street, the salvation of free speech was being proclaimed a few hundred yards up the road at the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand.

The Appeal Court's decision to overturn a privacy order granted to a married footballer under the Human Rights Act - preventing the Sunday People naming the player and his two lovers - is a landmark. The ruling seems almost too good to be true, especially when one sees the terms in which it is couched. At one bound, it seems, the press is free. Or is it?

Editors and media lawyers are still touching wood. Until now the Human Rights Act had seemed to be ushering in a de facto privacy law, based on Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides that "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence". In a series of actions brought to protect their privacy by Mr and Mrs Michael Douglas, Naomi Campbell and Amanda Holden, Article Eight began to look like a celebrities' charter.

This fear was reinforced when the footballer (who still can't be named because he may appeal to the Law Lords) was granted an injunction last November by Mr Justice Jack, on the grounds that the women, a lap dancer and a nursery teacher, owed him a duty of confidentiality akin to that of a wife. He rejected the Sunday People's argument that there was a public interest in what he called "salacious details".

Lord Wakeham, then chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, said the decision effectively ended 300 years of press freedom and amounted to "free licence for the bully and the cheat". Only last week Lord Rothermere, chairman of Associated Newspapers, publisher of this newspaper, told me of his concern that the Human Rights Act would be used to prevent the press from exposing wrongdoing.

Lawyers were split on the implications of the Jack verdict. Some argued that it would be a misuse of the Human Rights Act to muzzle the media. Others said it was hard to justify a public interest in exposing the lurid details of someone's personal life, such as showing nude pictures, taken without their consent, of a couple on honeymoon (which the Sunday People itself did not long ago). Although Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention provides a countervailing right to free expression, judges in previous cases appeared to give lesser weight to this defence, especially where tabloid newspapers were involved. Even though The Sun succeeded in reversing the jury's verdict in the libel case brought by ex-goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, their lordships were contemptuous of the values of the popular press.

Suddenly, with the Appeal Court judgment, all this has changed. In a key phrase the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, declared: "Once it is accepted that the freedom of the press should prevail, then the form of reporting in the press is not a matter for the courts but for the Press Council [now the PCC] and the customers of the newspaper concerned."

He added: "This is the position irrespective of whether a particular publication is desirable in the public interest." His reference to a footballer's duty as "a role model" came close to following American precedent, where people in the public eye are seen as fair game for press attention.

As a jubilant Sunday People editor, Neil Wallis, proclaimed: "This is a historic victory for press freedom. Lord Woolf has said there is no privacy law. This is tremendously important, not just for the tabloid media, but for the broadsheets and the broadcast media as well." It also has important implications for the PCC, whose ethical code and procedures will have to be seen as firm and consistent.

In reality, Monday's verdict was based on a narrow point of law: as to whether a mistress or a partner in casual sex has the same duty of confidentiality as a wife. There will be other cases where celebrities have stronger arguments for privacy, and these remain to be tested. But Lord Woolf 's assertion of the importance of the press's role in our society, and of the dangers of interfering with its freedom, will resonate through the courts in all future privacy cases.

As someone who has campaigned for 25 years to establish a constitutional right to free expression in this country, I am naturally gratified that this seems to have been finally recognised in our law. The purpose was to strengthen the media's power to investigate serious abuses in our public life. I never thought the crucial battleground would turn out to be a lap dancer's kiss-and-tell affair with a footballing "love rat".

? Donald Trelford, editor of The Observer from 1975 to 1993, is visiting professor in journalism studies at Sheffield University and president of the Media Society.