Appealing ?

Sir George Anthony Mann - better known in court as Mr Justice Mann - has made it very difficult for the BBC to appeal against the decision he's handed down against them (and South Yorkshire Police) in the case brought by Sir Cliff Richard.

The BBC's Director of News, Fran Unsworth, says the judgement, in what was a civil case, 'effectively makes it unlawful that anyone under investigation can be named, unless the police do so'. 

I think the judge is being more ring-savvy than that. He explicitly says he is not making new case law, but applying a balance between Section 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (incorporated into UK law) which talks about privacy rights, and Section 10, which protects freedom of expression, whether or not founded on public interest. In the case of Sir Cliff, he found there was no public interest in knowing it was Sir Cliff's flat that was being searched, except to 'gossip-mongers'.  He's not making publication of the names of those under investigation 'unlawful'; his decision means that hacks wishing to name individuals will have to produce a public interest defence, if they get sued.

In his full judgement, he found that the BBC asserted it was in the public interest to name him, but didn't really make a strong case to support it, or tie the decision to name Sir Cliff back to their own editorial guidelines.

His judgement makes several references to precedents in Gulati v MGN, when a certain Mr Justice Mann awarded punitive damages to a number of celebrities whose phones had been hacked at the behest of Mirror Group papers. Among the celebs - Alan Yentob.