Glenn Mulcaire is reported to be the journalist who tapped Simon Hughes‘ phone messages, leading to his high-profile “outing” during the leadership campaign of 2006.
Commenting on the opening of the ‘royal phone tapping’ trial today, Simon Hughes said:
Intercepting personal voicemail messages is a completely unacceptable breach of privacy – whether the victim is a royal prince, a politician, or someone completely out of the public eye.
People who leave messages and those intended to receive them are all entitled to have private conversations. We live in an age where invasions of privacy are becoming more frequent. This does not make the practice any more acceptable.
Tapping phones or intercepting messages should only be done with the authority of the law in the most exceptional cases and in the public interest. Tracking down terrorists is the obvious topical example.
I hope that all newspapers, and journalists more widely, and all their representative bodies will now confirm that this practice is unacceptable and that nobody else will have their privacy invaded in the same way.
I have long held the view that courts should be allowed to deprive those responsible for this sort of behaviour of their liberty because it is a serious offence to interfere with the freedoms of others.
Some people, like me, are resilient enough to take this sort of behaviour more or less in their stride, but other people are not, and nobody should have to.
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2 Comments
I’m not sure I’d totally go along with Simon on this. Phone tapping should only be done in the public interest – however I would suggest that was different from only being with the authority of the law.
It is of course also true that not every public interest involves a breach of the law. There are potential instances where the press should be able to act in the public interest to expose something which is not actually illegal – for example an arms deal with a repressive regime which whilst done legally was contrary to public statements. There would be no legal grounds for surveillance and intrusive press work in that instance but there would be a pretty solid moral basis.
What Simon is suggesting seems to remove such a public interest defence – which is ironic if we are talking about reintroducing a public interest defence for whistleblowers (see Nick Cleggs “Great Repeal Act”)
Glenn isn’t a journalist, he was head of security for NOTW.