The press worked itself up into a predictable lather of self-righteousness last week as editors saw their circulation figures threatened by privacy laws.

Firmly in their sights were what they called ‘super-injunctions’ - although an injunction whose existence may be reported is no more a super-injunction than a Crown Court judge is, to use another phrase much loved by the tabloids, a ‘top judge’.

Needless to say, the newspapers’ ire was misplaced.

It is not the injunctions that the press should be attacking, nor the judges who are bound to grant them.

It is the law of privacy, developed by the courts with parliament’s acquiescence.

Lord Irvine, the lord chancellor, alerted parliament when he introduced what became the Human Rights Act, requiring our judges to take account of European court rulings on the human rights convention.

Irvine told the Lords on 24 November 1997 that ‘the judges are pen-poised, regardless of incorporation of the convention, to develop a right to privacy’.

Irvine stressed that the judges were free to develop the common law in this direction.

‘What I say positively is that it will be a better law if the judges develop it after incorporation because they will have regard to articles 8 and 10, giving article 10 its due high value.’

Article 10 of the human rights convention protects freedom of expression while article 8 requires respect for a person’s privacy.

It is fair to say that Irvine’s emphasis on article 10 may have given peers the impression that freedom of expression would somehow trump privacy.

Maybe that is what everyone expected; the common law was, after all, weighted in favour of free speech before the judges used the law of confidence as the foundation for constructing a privacy law.

But, as Lord Steyn made clear in a case decided in 2004, neither article 10 nor article 8 has precedence over the other. ‘Where the values under the two articles are in conflict,’ he continued, ‘an intense focus on the comparative importance of the specific rights being claimed in the individual case is necessary.’

And that followed the Princess Caroline case, von Hannover v Germany, in which the European Court concluded that ‘the decisive factor in balancing the protection of private life against freedom of expression should lie in the contribution that [publications] make to a debate of general interest’.

So we have known since 2004 that unless publication is required in the public interest – as it clearly was with MPs’ expenses – the courts will protect information in which an applicant has a reasonable expectation of privacy. That includes sexual relationships.

Injunctions are just the next step down this road.

And the step after that is to grant a permanent order ‘against the world’, as Mr Justice Eady did on 20 April in a blackmail case reported as OPQ v BJM.

Although this was something of an innovation, it may be derived from the Human Rights Act.

It is also necessary for technical reasons: under the so-called Spycatcher doctrine, an injunction against one news organisation binds all others that know about it.

But this doctrine no longer applies once a case has been decided or settled.

All this assumes that the information in question deserves protection.

Clearly, the media should not be allowed to publish the ‘intimate photographs’ obtained by the blackmailer in the OPQ case.

Certainly, there is also some public interest in keeping a blackmail victim’s identity private; otherwise, he might be unwilling to go to the police.

And it is equally clear that naming the blackmailer in this case would lead to identification of the claimant, with whom we may infer she had a sexual relationship. But why shouldn’t reporters be allowed to identify them both?

The same question arises from a Court of Appeal decision delivered last week, ETK v News Group Newspapers.

This case certainly involved an adulterous sexual relationship between the claimant and a female colleague ‘in the entertainment industry’.

If footballers and other entertainers are going to carry on like this, shouldn’t we be allowed to know about their activities?

And if public figures are foolish enough to be caught out by blackmailers, shouldn’t victims publicly face down their accusers?

If the player is married or in what he regards as a ‘permanent’ relationship, is ‘playing away from home’ regarded as immoral these days?

You or I may think that the individuals concerned have shown a lack of morality, especially towards the women involved, but that is not what matters.

The footballers presumably don’t think they are behaving immorally or don’t care what people think of their behaviour; otherwise they wouldn’t behave as they do.

If they do care, then the fear of publicity should deter them from behaviour that they know is wrong.

And what about the media? As Lord Justice Ward said in the ETK case last week, echoing earlier comments by Lord Woolf: ‘To restrict publication simply to save the blushes of the famous... could have the wholly undesirable chilling effect on the necessary ability of publishers to sell their newspapers.’

The courts’ answer in both cases was that injunctions were needed to protect the health or wellbeing of members of the claimants’ families. To which the newspapers’ response is that the claimants have only themselves to blame.

Visiting the sins of fathers on their children cannot be consistent with the children’s human rights.

But that should not stop us taking a close look at whether all sexual activity, however reprehensible, should continue to attract a reasonable expectation of privacy.