We reported recently that the Supreme Court had given Morrisons permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal’s judgment in Various Claimants v Morrison Supermarkets Plc (vicarious liability/data breach case). I can now confirm that the hearing of the appeal is due to take place on 6-7 November 2019.
Anya Proops QC
Following my post confirming that the Supreme Court has granted permission in Various Claimants v Morrison Supermarket Plc, I have had quite a few email queries as to the scope of the grounds of appeal. To put you in the picture, permission has been granted on all grounds. In a nutshell, this means that the Supreme Court will be considering: Continue reading
In case you were wondering what had happened to this case, the Supreme Court has just confirmed that permission has been granted to Morrisons for it to appeal against the judgment of the Court of Appeal in Morrison Supermarkets PLC v Various Claimants [2018] EWCA Civ 2338. No doubt further updates will follow on Panopticon in due course.
Anya Proops QC
So after many of months of GDPR-related anguish, finally some good news for data controllers: with effect from last Saturday (6th April), conditional fee agreement (CFA) success fees will no longer be recoverable from defendants in privacy or defamation proceedings, at least where the relevant CFA was entered into after 5 April.
The legislative story goes like this (deep breath!): Continue reading
So if you, like me, were wondering whatever happened to Mr Kennedy’s case against the Charity Commission, wonder no longer. It turns out that last December the European Court of Human Rights decided to dismiss Mr Kennedy’s Article 10 claim on the ground that it was inadmissible by reason of the availability of an alternative remedy – see the judgment here.
The background, as you may recall, is that Mr Kennedy, a Times journalist, was trying to get information out of the Charity Commission in connection with the ‘Mariam Appeal’, a fund set up by George Galloway MP for the purposes of supporting Iraqi children suffering from leukaemia. Mr Kennedy wanted to get hold of the information in connection with an investigation he was conducting into whether monies Continue reading
The judgment of Mitting J in the case of TLT is now routinely invoked in the context of discussions over how you go about quantifying the value of a distress damages claim where there has been a data breach. In TLT, the Home Office had accidentally disclosed online a spreadsheet containing data relating to asylum seekers and their families. As you may recall, Mitting J awarded TLT compensation of £12,500 on the basis that he had suffered distress as a result of the disclosure akin to a moderate psychiatric injury. This award was made in circumstances where the judge had concluded that the disclosure had resulted in TLT having a rational fear that he would be targeted by the Iranian authorities, to the point where he had felt compelled to relocate his entire family. The judge also held that, whilst they were not named in the spreadsheet, TLT’s wife and daughter (TLU and TLV) were also entitled to distress damages as their identity and the fact that they were seeking asylum could readily be inferred from the disclosed data. Continue reading
