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Court rules UK newspaper should not have to pay Naomi Campbell’s legal bills

The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday ruled in favor of a British newspaper that was ordered to pay “disproportionate” legal fees when it lost a privacy case brought by model Naomi Campbell.

The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights found that the more than £1 million ($1.6 million) that British courts ordered the Daily Mirror newspaper’s publishers to pay was a violation of its right to freedom of expression.

The paper’s publisher, MGN Limited, was ordered to pay the fees after a British court found that the newspaper had violated Campbell’s right to privacy by publishing photographs of her outside a drug rehabilitation clinic. One of the newspaper’s articles was headlined: “Naomi: I am a drug addict.”

The publishers were ordered to pay £3,500 in damages and also Campbell’s legal fees, including a so-called “success fee” which forces the losing side of a case to pay the other side’s legal costs.

The European court ruled that the newspaper had indeed violated her privacy but that the “success fee” system should not apply to Campbell because she could afford to pay legal costs herself.

“Campbell had been wealthy and therefore not someone who risked not having access to court on financial grounds and for whom the ‘success fees’ scheme had been initially set up,” the court said.

The requirement for the newspaper to pay the fee was therefore “disproportionate to the aim sought to be achieved by the introduction of the ‘success fee’ system,” the court said.

The court will later consider how much to award in damages to MGN Limited.