Breach of confidence in English law is an equitabledoctrine that allows a person to claim a remedy when their confidence has been breached. A duty of confidence arises when confidential information comes to the knowledge of a person in circumstances in which it would be unfair if it were disclosed to others. Breach of confidence gives rise to a civil claim. The Human Rights Act 1998 has developed the law on breach of confidence so that it now applies to private bodies as well as public ones.
Statement
The "three traditional requirements of the cause of action for breach of confidence" were identified by Robert Megarry in Coco v A N Clark Ltd in the following terms:
History
The modern Englishlaw of confidence stems from the judgment of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cottenham, in which he restrained the defendant from publishing a catalogue of private etchings made by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. However, the jurisprudential basis of confidentiality remained largely unexamined until the case of Saltman Engineering Co. Ltd. v Campbell Engineering Co. Ltd., in which the Court of Appeal upheld the existence of an equitable doctrine of confidence, independent of contract. In Attorney-General v Observer Ltd – the Spycatcher case – Lord Goff of Chieveley identified three limitations to the doctrine: The incorporation into domestic law of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights by the Human Rights Act 1998 has since had a profound effect on the development of the English law of confidentiality. Article 8 provides that everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. In Campbell v MGN Ltd, the House of Lords held that the Daily Mirror had breached Naomi Campbell’s confidentiality rights by publishing reports and pictures of her attendance at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Although the court divided 3–2 as to the result of the appeal and adopted slightly different formulations of the applicable principles, there was broad agreement that, in confidentiality cases involving issues of privacy, the focus shifted from the nature of the relationship between claimant and defendant to an examination of the nature of the information itself and a balancing exercise between the claimant's rights under Article 8 and the defendant's competing rights.
