PPT v ITN and The Guardian – The Right to Life and Freedom from Torture
Dr Sophie Gallop, Senior Lecturer at NLS https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/law/sophie-gallop
Introduction
The High Court recently denied an application from a celebrity seeking an injunction to permanently restrain ITN and The Guardian from publishing a story which would reveal his identity and allegations of serious misconduct.
Prohibitory injunctions are equitable orders that prevent an action from being undertaken to avoid harm that would otherwise ensue or continue. In some contexts, including disputes relating to the privacy of celebrities and the freedom of the press, there are human rights at stake in these applications.
Typically, decisions about granting injunctions or super-injunctions (where the media is prohibited from both publishing private information and reporting the fact that the injunction exists) requested by public figures have revolved around a careful balance between the Article 8 right of the public figure and the Article 10 right of the media organisation. On the one hand, the public figure and their family, have an Article 8 right to privacy, and in some instances, safety. On the other, the relevant media organisation and their audience have an Article 10 right to Freedom of Expression and to both impart and receive that information. As the Supreme Court noted in PJS v News Group Newspapers, neither Article 8 nor Article 10 has automatic preference over the other, so, as result, what is necessary in an ‘intense focus on the comparative importance of the rights’ being claimed in the particular case at hand.
What has been particularly unusual and interesting with respect to the injunction being sought in PPT is that much of the claim has focused on two different Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights: Articles 2 (the right to life) and 3 (freedom from torture, inhuman, and degrading treatment), although the Article 8 right to private and family life was also in play.
PPT v ITN and The Guardian
Whilst the injunction was denied earlier this week, litigation around these proposed publications began months prior. A previous interim injunction was sought by PPT which would have prevented both PPT and the media organisations involved from being identified. On the 5th of October 2026 Mr Justice Nicklin ordered that PPT be anonymised in the proceedings but declined to anonymise the defendants (ITN and The Guardian). The interim order also prohibited the identification of three individuals (CA, CB, and CC) who had given accounts about PPT’s conduct to The Guardian and ITN.
In his judgment Mr Justice Nicklin addressed whether a permanent injunction, like the one seen in PJS, should be granted to restrain ITN and The Guardian from ever publishing the story or substantially similar information.
The defendants both planned to publish a story on PPT which addressed his ‘conduct towards a number of individuals… in a variety of professional and personal contexts… over a period of years…’. This included the ‘alleged abuse of his power and status as a well-known public figure in order to establish contact with young women, who were considerably younger than him, and engage in, and/or seek to engage in inappropriate sexual activity, including potential criminal activity’.
PPT gave a broad denial of the allegations.
Articles 2 and 3
In May 2026, PPT received letters from The Guardian with a detailed invitation to comment. According to evidence from PPT’s personal assistant, PPT said that ‘he could not endure the adverse publicity and wanted to take his own life’. Later that day PPT was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and a few months later left the hospital during a period of leave and attempted to take his own life.
It was therefore on the basis of PPT’s medical evidence that he contended that publication would be incompatible with his Article 2 Right to Life as the publication would create a continuing risk to his life through suicide. Similarly, he further contended that it would be incompatible with his Article 3 Right to Freedom from Torture, Inhuman, and Degrading treatment on the basis of the anticipated psychiatric suffering and risk of self-harm.
Mr Justice Nicklin acknowledged that evidence from the Single Joint Expert, a psychiatrist, demonstrated that there would be a ‘very substantial increase in suicide risk associated with the Court’s decision and publication’. He therefore identified the following questions with respect to Articles 2 and 3:
(1) Whether the circumstances fell within the positive operation duty under Article 2;
(2) Whether the anticipated psychiatric suffering and risk of self-harm were capable of engaging a positive operational obligation under Article 3;
(3) Whether the recognition would amount to a permissible incremental development of principles established before the European Court of Human Rights or would establish an entirely new principle (contrary to the decision in Ullah);
(4) Which institutions, the psychiatric hospital, other mental-health services, or the Court, had assumed, or otherwise would bear, relevant State responsibility.
With respect to the issues surrounding the Right to Life, the Court acknowledged that the test to determine whether a State’s positive obligation under Article 2 (the Osman test) was engaged – the decision permitting publication, the anticipation of publication, and the publication itself would each materially and very substantially increase PPT’s risk of suicide, and therefore there was a ‘real and immediate’ risk to life.
However, the Court concluded that this did not mean that the situation fell within an operational obligation borne by the Court to restrain the publications. Whilst psychiatric services had assumed responsibility for protecting PPT against suicide, it did not follow from that the responsibility, or from the Court’s knowledge of the likely consequences of the publication, that Article 2 required the Court to prevent every external event which could cause an acute escalation of the risk of suicide. Mr Justice Nicklin concluded that to recognise such an operational duty would create a new category of positive duty which would not be consistent with previous case law.
Similarly, with respect to Article 3, the Court accepted that the publication would cause PPT acute and potentially prolonged mental suffering. Nonetheless, Mr Justice Nicklin noted that the journalism did not constitute ‘treatment’ by the State for the purposes of Article 3 – the publication would be the act of a private media organisation rather than the State. The Court’s refusal to grant a prohibitory injunction would not transform that publication into State treatment. To create a new principle which would create a positive operation duty on authorities to restrain publication would establish a new principle of Convention law.
As a result, the claims based on Articles 2 and 3 were dismissed.
Article 8
PPT also relied on, in the alternative, Article 8 – the more traditional human rights vehicle for applications for injunctions. The Court also rejected the Article 8 claim.
Mr Justice Nicklin acknowledged that Article 8 would be engaged with respect to both privacy and family life, given that Article 8 includes the right to psychological integrity and that PPT’s relationship with his son would likely be impacted by publication.
Nonetheless, the Article 10 rights on the other side were substantial, including the Defendant’s right to investigate and publish; the Article 10 rights of their sources to communicate their experiences; and the Article 10 rights of the public to receive information and ideas on matters of a public interest. The Court concluded that, given that the injunction would be comprehensive and potentially indefinite, that the proposed publications concerned matters of substantial public interest, and that the information itself was not alleged to be private, it could not read Article 8 as requiring the Court to eliminate every sources of psychiatric distress by imposing a prior restrain on the lawful activities of private parties.
Conclusion
The claim for an injunction was therefore dismissed in its entirety.
However, this may well not be the end of the story – the anonymity and reporting restrictions are to remain in force during the period allowed for seeking permission to appeal. As a result, the stories remain unpublished and PPT is still anonymised.
In the meantime, we are left in a strange legal quagmire. On various social media platforms, posters are alleging to reveal the identity of PPT. In the past these ‘revelations’ have proven to be false or have been staunchly denied (see for example Jemima Khan’s and Gabby Logan’s respective denials of Twitter claims that they had obtained injunctions). Whilst ITN and The Guardian are constrained for now, the public on the internet is, in practice, unregulated.
Nonetheless, the instant decision will be welcome to newspapers and media companies more widely. The claims under Articles 2 and 3 represented a new, and potentially chilling, challenge to press freedom. Unlike Article 8, Article 3 is absolute. As a result, where Article 3 is breached the courts cannot undertake a balancing exercise between the rights of the public figure and the Article 10 rights of the respective media organisation. More generally, a decision recognising that domestic courts have a proper juridical basis to prohibit publication under Articles 2 and 3 when serious claims are made against a public figure which might severely impair their mental health could, in practice, prevent important investigative journalism and undermine the Article 10 rights of the media and the public. Nevertheless, with an appeal anticipated, this matter may be far from settled.
Further Reading:
R (Ullah) v Special Adjudicator [2004] 2 AC 323
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