THE LEVESON INQUIRY investigating the ethics and behaviour of the UK’s media will today hear from some of its most high-profile witnesses to date.
Actress Sienna Miller, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, and former motorsport chief Max Mosley will all give testimony to the inquiry, which is continuing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
Evidence will begin with the testimony of an unnamed party, HJK, who has taken a so-called ‘super-injunction’ at the High Court to stop the press from publishing details of their private life. Their session will be held without press or public witnesses.
Mosley, the former president of world motorsport’s governing body the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, has fought extended legal battles against the press – most notably against the News of the World, who had published a piece detailing his involvement in sexual acts involving several prostitutes.
Mosley successfully argued that the article breached his privacy, but lost a later follow-up case in the European Court of Human Rights where he sought to have newspapers forced to inform people before they exposed their private lives.
A vocal critic of British media culture, Mosley has also offered to personally guarantee the court and legal costs of other people taking legal action against the News of the World over the paper’s phone-hacking.
Miller, whose mobile phone voicemail was hacked by people working for the News of the World during her relationship with actor Jude Law, was awarded £100,000 damages in court earlier this year.
Rowling has had her own run-ins with the press – the author is famously protective of her privacy and that of her children, and in 2008 took court action to stop the Sunday Express printing a photograph of her pushing her son in a pram.
The inquiry, which began in September, is hearing evidence from 46 public figures over the coming weeks. It has already heard this week from the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, of the missing child Madeleine McCann, and from actors Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant.
TheJournal.ie will carry live streaming of public events when they begin later this morning.
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