The Right To Privacy: A Right Without A Remedy

The identities of Baby P's killers have recently been disclosed officially. The court order prohibiting such disclosure was lifted because it ceased to be necessary. The sad fact is that the order was ineffective to prevent bloggers from disclosing the identities months before the courts had deemed it appropriate to do so.

Baby P's siblings are innocent and yet they have, by implication, been named alongside Baby P's killers. Each sibling has their own right to privacy which incorporates a right to control their identity. Public disclosure of their identities constitutes a breach of their right to privacy. The damage they suffer is immediate, irreparable and enduring.

Disrespect for the court order prohibiting disclosure of Baby P's killers meant that the identities of the wrongdoers and, implicitly, the identities of Baby P's siblings, were spread over the internet whilst an order restraining disclosure was in place. This has two effects:

First, the siblings' connections with Baby P's tragic death have been immortalised on the internet. The internet is for life, and so the siblings may well be subject to a lifetime of ridicule, scorn and bullying despite their innocence. The court order was rendered ineffective as was the siblings' rights to privacy. The courts are meant to be the arbitral charged with objectively balancing competing interests of disclosure or privacy. They have been rendered powerless as against the court of public opinion in which morals, anger, frustrations and personal opinions of the few could change the willingness of the courts in future to grant orders which are desperately needed but ineffective. Background

Two years after the tragic death of Baby P, the identity of his killers has been officially revealed.

Publication of the identities of Baby P's mother and her partner, both of whom have been held responsible for Baby P's death, was initially prohibited by a court order. This restriction was imposed to protect Baby P's siblings and to ensure that his mother and her partner were not prejudiced in a separate, contemporary criminal trial. The court order has now been lifted on the basis that the other criminal trial had been concluded and Baby P's siblings had all been put into care.

The court order restrained the mainstream newspapers and magazines from publishing the identities, but was rendered ineffective in practical terms by the prolific blogging that has become part of modern society. The pre-emptive...