It's that dastardly Human Rights Act again!

Shocking news in the Sun - a Premier League football manager has been caught visiting a brothel! It isn't the amazingly banal story we're interested in though, but the paper's claim as to why it can't name him:

Creeping privacy laws in the UK, based on the Human Rights Act, mean we are barred from naming him.

A nice try, but no. I might end up eating my words, but my guess at what's happened here, based so far on how there seems to be no specific news from other sites, no postings of rulings on bailii or boasts about representation on the usual media law firms sites, is that the Sun has been given an injunction barring it from naming the man until a full hearing has been heard, something which has been standard for years and has nothing to do with the HRA as yet. Indeed, yours truly was given an injunction back in 2006 by the lawyers of News of the World hack Mazher Mahmood for the heinous crime of posting photographs of the man over on my main blog. Also key here is that the Sun has not received a so-called "super injunction" like that which the Guardian did in the Trafigura case which prevents the paper from even mentioning the fact that it has been gagged.

Still, always worth a go blaming the Human Rights Act. That Times Newspapers (prop. R Murdoch) were one of the first to use the newly passed HRA to try and get out of a libel payment is neither here nor there, OK?