BroadcastingComplaints - unwarranted infringement of privacy -company's privacy capable of being infringedR v Broadcasting Standards Commission, ex parte British Broadcasting Corporation: CA (Lord Woolf MR, Hale LJ and Lord Mustill: 6 April 2000

The Broadcasting Standards Commission upheld a complaint by a company pursuant to ss.110 and 111 of the Broadcasting Act 1996 that secret filming of transactions in its stores by the applicant, in connection with the making of a consumer affairs programme, was an unwarranted infringement of its privacy.

On the applicant's application for judicial review, the judge held that the meaning of privacy in the 1996 Act was ambiguous and should be interpreted in accordance with the convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953) (Cmd.

8969) and that, since art.

8 did not protect companies, a company could not bring a complaint of unwarranted infringement of its own privacy under the 1996 Act.

The judge further held that there could be no infringement of privacy by the mere fact of surreptitious filming of an event in public if there was no element of seclusion in the event being filmed and he allowed the application and quashed the commission's adjudication.

The commission appealed.Michael Beloff QC and Rabinder Singh (instructed by Gregory, Rowcliffe & Milners) for the commission.

David Pannick QC and Kate Gallafent (instructed by BBC Litigation Department) for the applicant.Held, allowing the appeal, that art.

8 of the convention was concerned with privacy in a different context to the 1996 Act; that, while it might be appropriate to construe a statute so that it did not provide less than the protection given by the convention, the convention should not be used to cut down the protection which a statute would otherwise provide; that companies had activities of a private nature which needed protection from unwarranted intrusion and it was most unlikely that Parliament had not intended those activities to be protected under the Act; that, therefore, a company could bring a complaint of unwarranted infringement of its privacy under the Act; that the commission had been entitled to conclude that secret filming of transactions in the company's stores was an unwarranted infringement of its privacy; and that, accordingly, the commission's adjudication would be restored.

(WLR)