For an editor of a national newspaper – if you choose to call the Sun a newspaper when there’s a strong case for reclassifying it as a comic – Rebekah Wade has a pretty flaky idea of how the law works. She told the Guardian today:

The point of concern is there is just one man making the law by setting a precedent sitting on his own. In a democracy that cannot be good for society. The point of having one solitary judge who is unelected and unaccountable who is setting a precedent in British law … I think a lot of people will be surprised that he sat alone in the Max Mosley case because there’s no jury in privacy cases.

She doesn’t know, apparently, that any judgements reached by Mr Justice Eady can be challenged in the Appeal Court and then the House of Lords, and she ignores the obvious truth that in 1998, Parliament after all due deliberation, passed the Human Rights Act, which grants citizens of the United kingdom “the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” And the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we are signatories, also declares, “Failure to respect an individual’s privacy can lead to distress and in certain circumstances can cause that individual real damage, mentally physically and financially. Privacy is in itself a value that needs protecting, even when the loss suffered is not readily quantifiable in terms of damage and distress.”

The Sun is not noted for its respect of individual privacy, and it deserves any chastisement it’s got coming to it.

And here’s a curious thing – if a jury in the Mosley trial had been composed of News of the World readers, a survey run by the paper itself, asking them specifically what they would have done if they’d been sitting on the case, showed that a good majority of those readers would have found for Max Mosley. So it looks like Eady’s decision reflected the public view.