Wainwright v. Home Office [2003] UKHL 53; [2003] 3 WLR 1137 is an English tort law case concerning the arguments for a tort of privacy, and the action for battery.
A young man with cerebral palsy, with his mother, went to visit his brother in Leeds prison. Because the brother had been suspected of taking drugs in jail, they were asked to consent to strip searching. It was conducted in a way that breached r.86 of the Prison Rules 1964. The young man suffered post traumatic stress syndrome and the mother was humiliated. The judge held that this was both battery and an invasion of their "right to privacy". He awarded them compensatory damages and aggravated damages amounting. Mr Wainwright got £4500 and £3500 respectively, and Mrs Wainwright (who suffered no medically recognised illness) got £2600 and £1600. This was overturned in the Court of Appeal by Lord Woolf MR, and set aside the damages for "privacy invasion" and kept the damages for battery.
Judgment
Lord Hoffmann held that there was no tort for invasion of privacy, because (owing to the experience in America) it was too uncertain. Moreover, a claim under Article 8 of the ECHR, (right to privacy and family life) did not help because the Convention was merely a standard which applied to whatever was currently present in the common law. Common law protection was sufficient privacy protection for the ECHR's purpose. The assertion that there may have been a breach of Article 3 (inhuman and degrading treatment) was completely unfounded.[1] He held that there was also no claim for a tort of intention to cause harm under the Wilkinson v Downton case.
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