With privacy laws now on the political agenda in Ireland, Lara Marlowe looks at how they have been operating in France.
It was one of Isabelle Adjani's most memorable performances. In 1986, a short-lived gossip magazine called Aujourd'hui Madame reported that the French film star had contracted Aids. She was rumoured to have died. Adjani went on the evening news to announce, "I am not dead".
Two years later, Adjani was awarded the equivalent of €340,000 in damages, which she contributed to charity. "It would have been far more serious if she really had Aids and they revealed it," says her lawyer, Gilles Dreyfus. Though Adjani became his client after the Aids story, Dreyfus estimates he's won about 10 lawsuits on her behalf, against Voici, and Ici Paris, and France-Dimanche, magazines that specialise in the love life of stars.
Damages in French privacy cases vary wildly, from a single symbolic euro to a maximum of €50,000.
"€15,000 is considered a very good result," Dreyfus says. The average awarded by tribunals is between €4,000 and €10,000." Dreyfus won a substantial award for Roman Polanski 10 years ago. Voici magazine reported that the film director was allowing his ageing mother to die of hunger in Krakow by sending her the equivalent of €10 per month. She in fact died in a Nazi gas chamber in 1942.
Polanski, Adjani and other celebrities fight their cases on the basis of Article 9 of the French civil code. Article 9, dated July 1970, was born of a series of rulings on the right to privacy in the 1960s. "Everyone has the right to respect for his private life," it says. "The court may prescribe any measures, such as sequestration, seizure and others, appropriate to prevent or put an end to an invasion of personal privacy..."
Though not widely used as a basis for litigation, the European Convention on Human Rights has guaranteed the same right since November 1950.
"Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and correspondence," Article 8 of the Convention says. "There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right..."
On rare occasions, French plaintiffs sue under Article 226-1 of the penal code, which provides for up to one year's imprisonment and a fine of €45,000 "for any wilful violation of the intimacy of the private life of other persons by resorting to any means of 1) intercepting, recording or transmitting words uttered in confidence or private circumstances... 2) taking, recording or transmitting the picture of a person within a private place..."
The invasion of privacy is a misdemeanour if committed in public and a crime punishable by prison if committed in a private place. But the distinction between public and private places is difficult to establish, and the penal code is rarely invoked.
Lawyers have argued whether a hotel swimming pool or the staircase of an apartment building are public or private. Three times - in cases involving the actress Romy Schneider, Princess Caroline of Monaco and Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayad - French courts ruled that a boat at sea is a private place.
So what is privacy? Gilles Dreyfus's clients include Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, Émmanuelle Béart, Sophie Marceau, Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte. But when it comes to defining what constitutes private life, the definition is the same for all, based on jurisprudence rather than specific texts.
"Private life means family and sentimental life," Dreyfus explains. "It means respect for the dead, leisure and pleasure, relationships of love and friendship, religion, everything that touches health and illness."
Most of the privacy cases in France involve photographs. Though the droit à l'image (right to one's image) figures nowhere in the legal code, it is interpreted to fall under Article 9 on the respect of private life. Albert and Stephanie of Monaco and the television presenter Claire Chazal are famous for suing the instant a "stolen photo" taken without authorisation is published.
Over the last decade, the droit à l'image has increasingly threatened the freedom of information. Unless people are attending a political rally or are part of a crowd - in which case they are deemed to have news value - their image cannot be published or broadcast without their permission.
"We are constantly weighing the right to privacy against the right to information," says Jean-Marc LeBugle, legal director for the international French channel TV5. "The trend is more and more towards protecting the individual's rights." Because it broadcasts to 160 million homes around the world, TV5 risks prohibitive fines, and like other networks routinely errs on the side of caution by blurring faces.
In France, the right to one's image extends to property, which can lead to ridiculous excesses. A young man and the parents of his nephew were awarded €7,500 because uncle and nephew were photographed, smiling, by an agency photographer through an aquarium in Boulogne-sur-Mer. The owner of a motorcycle demanded - unsuccessfully - €15,200 because his motorcycle appeared in a postcard of Saint-Tropez. The licence plate wasn't even visible.
This year, a suit by the artists Daniel Buren and Christian Drevet went all the way to France's highest appeals court before being thrown out. Buren and Drevet demanded compensation because a public square they had refurbished in Lyons appeared on a postcard.
Absurd as these examples seem, the government has led the way in commercialising the right to images. Professional photographers who want to work on the grounds or in the palace at Versailles must pay a €470 daily fee. Le Monde reported that a French municipality demanded € 150 for a 15-minute interview recorded in a public park - a sort of tax for occupying public space.
"The droit à l'image has become an impediment to freedom of expression," says Florence Braka, the deputy director of the French Federation of Press Agencies (FFAP). In 1999, the former French justice minister Elisabeth Guigou provoked a huge debate when she directed that photographers no longer photograph suspects wearing handcuffs, saying that showing them violated the presumption of innocence. A dispute over showing victims of terrorist attacks was resolved when Article 16 of the civil code, which demands respect for human dignity, was interpreted as sufficient to prevent the filming of wounded or dead people.
The FFAP has been campaigning for five years to have French privacy laws changed. The press syndicate is circulating among French legislators a proposed new version of Article 9 which states that "the provisions of this article may not in any way affect the publication or broadcasting of the image of a person for educational, scientific or news purposes, with the reservation that human dignity must be respected".
If adopted, this new version would make the French law similar to Italian law.
French stars play the privacy game both ways, colluding with gossip magazines when it suits them, screaming murder when their rights are violated. Paris Match pays undisclosed sums to stars who divulge their private lives for cover stories. For example, last week the ageing rock star Johnny Halliday and his young wife Laetitia showed off their newly adopted Vietnamese baby at her baptism. Unlike the stars, French politicians almost never sue. They don't need to because French media regard the private lives of politicians with reverence. Clintonesque exploits have been rumoured to go on at the Élysée Palace under several presidencies, but French media never allude to them. "It's more out of self-censorship than respect for the law," says Hervé Algalarrondo, an editor at the Nouvel Observateur Magazine.
Francois Mitterrand's 14 years at the Élysée tested the taboo on covering politicians' private lives. Mitterrand established a secret intelligence cell to tap the phones of journalists who knew about Mazarine, his daughter by his mistress.
Paris Match finally broke the story, shortly before Mitterrand's death, possibly with his acquiescence. Critics of the long media silence said the fact that Mazarine was raised at taxpayers' expense would have justified revealing the secret sooner.
Over the last month, French media have timidly covered the marital difficulties of the ambitious interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, mainly because "Sarko" discussed it on television. There has been nothing as daring as the Swiss newspaper headline, "Nicolas Dumped by Cecilia". And although French politicians and media widely discuss Sarkozy's alleged infidelities in private, not a line appeared in print until Sarkozy himself said: "People attribute a lot of adventures to me. I'm not up to my reputation."