Former justice secretary Jack Straw has urged Parliament to amend the Human Rights Act to include a tort for breach of privacy.<\/p>\n
“I think parliament needs to take this job on now,” Straw told the Leveson Inquiry<\/a> today, adding that doing so would send a message to the public that they had “the right to have their privacy protected”.<\/p>\n Echoing his 2011\u00a0Gareth Williams memorial lecture<\/a>, Straw said that legislating on privacy has gone\u00a0“through a side door” by relying on the HRA. There is no current tort on privacy in English common law, though section 12 of the HRA<\/a>\u00a0says that a court must regard the extent to which a media defendant has complied with “any relevant privacy code”.<\/p>\n Straw, who was Home Secretary from 1997-2001 and Foreign Secretary from 2001-2006, also claimed self-regulation of the press had “palpably failed” and that regulation with statutory underpinning was the only means of compelling newspaper groups to join into a system.<\/p>\n “If you leave it to self-regulation we will end up with the absurd situation where they [the press] are judge and jury in their own courts,” Straw said, adding that the\u00a0press “can’t go on claiming every other institution in the land needs external regulation” while it continues to regulate itself.<\/p>\n However he dismissed counsel Robert Jay QC’s suggestion of the possibility of state control in newspaper content as “nonsensical”.<\/p>\n Straw flagged newsroom culture as an area of concern, adding that the press needed to be “more examining of what they are doing” and that the Inquiry itself provided a “mirror” for journalists.<\/p>\n