Judge says football star has no right to privacy injunction

It came after the country's most senior media judge today announced he planned to name a Premier League footballer but kept his identity secret while he gave him two weeks to challenge the decision.

Mr Justice Tugendhat was the judge who refused to allow Chelsea captain John Terry to keep his identity secret when he sought to block publication of reports concerning an alleged affair with Vanessa Perroncel.

Now the judge, who last month took charge of the High Court division handling defamation and privacy cases, has said people seeking injunctions should expect to be named.

In the latest case, he gave the footballer two weeks to make a case at the Court of Appeal if he did not wish to have his name revealed as being the person seeking to ban press stories about his personal life.

The footballer, identified only by the case initials JIH, obtained the injunction in August after telling another judge that his "right to privacy" under the Human Rights Act would be infringed by the stories.

But Justice Tugendhat set aside the injunction, saying there was a "general public interest" in naming people involved in court cases.

The judge also refused to allow the footballer permission to appeal his ruling at the Court of Appeal - an indication of the confidence he has in his own judgement.

After considering the arguments made by lawyers representing the footballer and News Group Newspapers, owners of The Sun and News of the World, Justice Tugendhat said naming claimants would not prevent them from coming to court.

The only exceptions were likely to be cases where they were being blackmailed or caught up in other criminal activity. It was also better to name a claimant and restrict details of the case than do the reverse and risk the claimant's name emerging through "jigsaw identification", which happens when extra information emerges that reveals an identity.

Justice Tugendhat said: "In most cases an application for an injunction in which the claimant is named is unlikely to make the publicity worse from the claimant's point of view than it would be if he obtained an injunction anonymously.

"If a claimant is named in circumstances where there is already information about him in the public domain, it does not follow that the subject matter of the injunction must be the information which has most recently been put in the public domain.

"The only real choice is to allow the public to know the claimant's identity or to allow them to know nothing at all about the action."