Why are celebrities entitled to a private life

To listen to an interview with Barnes, click here: Law professor Robin Barnes discusses her new book, Outrageous Invasions. Over the past several decades, Barnes says, the U. Why throw every athlete, actor, and musician into the same pot? Celebrities are not public servants. That argument is specious at best. The European Convention contains specific provisions that identify human dignity as a paramount value.

Not so in the United States, where free speech always trumps. Examining the outcomes of numerous legal battles from the U. Supreme Court as well as the High Courts of Europe, Barnes identifies the differences in the protections granted European celebrities versus those given to American stars when it comes to the entertainment press.

They want to separate the issue because of the longstanding need to offer respect for individual privacy. When they can get people to focus on Tiger Woods and not the corporate scandals on Wall Street, they win. Ideally, however, Barnes would like to put the book in the hands of the people she wants to read it — namely, she says, every judge on the federal circuit.

November 12, While many people may wonder what Royalty get up to on holiday, this is not enough to justify the invasion of privacy that the taking of clandestine photos leads to. Unlike private citizens, celebrities need to attract media attention in order to promote their work — perhaps their latest film or your favourite Netflix series.

This leads people, and often newspapers, to question whether they are in any position to criticise the media attention that surrounds them. The couple had sold the exclusive right to publish their wedding photos to OK! However, Hello! Magazine had secretly obtained photos and published them first. Because the couple had sold the rights to publish photos, this presented a tension in asserting their right to privacy before the courts. However, in a blow to right to privacy campaigners, he stressed that his ruling was based on the grounds of commercial confidentiality , not the right to privacy.

The real problem may no longer lie with newspaper editors in print, but with private individuals online. In a case known as PJS , an injunction was granted and upheld to prevent the publication of a story detailing the sexual encounters of an individual married to someone in the entertainment industry.

People were quick to point out that PJS had been named online multiple times, raising doubt as to whether an injunction was effective at all. This presents an altogether different problem: what remedy should be available to celebrities when a private citizen invades their privacy?

Human rights are just that — they apply to us all. The question today is not whether celebrities have a right to privacy, but how the balance should be struck between privacy and free expression. Social media has given us an even greater platform to exercise our freedom of expression, but our article 8 right to privacy remains just as important.

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