The European Court of Human Rights today rejected a bid by former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley to force newspapers to give prior notification to people they are writing stories about.

Judges in Strasbourg held that the move could have a “seriously chilling” effect on freedom of expression.

Mr Mosley complained to the court that the absence of a legal obligation for prior notification was a breach of his right to respect for his privacy and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case followed the publication in March 2008 in the News of the World of a story detailing Mr Mosley’s participation in a sado-masochistic sex session with five prostitutes. The newspaper ran the story without putting it to him first, fearing that he would obtain an injunction to stop publication.

Mr Mosley was subsequently awarded £60,000 damages after the High Court ruled that there was no public interest justification for the story.

But Mr Mosley pursued the case to the Human Rights Court, challenging UK privacy laws which currently allow publication of stories without giving advanced warning to people named in them.

The court said that while the facts of Mr Mosley’s case were a backdrop to the issue, the implications of a pre-notification requirement were far wider, extending to political reporting and serious investigative journalism.

It said that while there was a diversity of practice among European member states, the consensus was against a pre-notification requirement rather than in favour of it.

The judges said: “The court is persuaded that concerns regarding the effectiveness of a pre-notification duty in practice are not unjustified.

“Two considerations arise. First, it is generally accepted that any pre-notification obligation would require some form of ‘public interest’ exception.

“Thus a newspaper could opt not to notify a subject if it believed that it could subsequently defend its decision on the basis of the public interest.

“The court considers that in order to prevent a serious chilling effect on freedom of expression, a reasonable belief that there was a ‘public interest’ at stake would have to be sufficient to justify non-notification, even if it were subsequently held that no such ‘public interest’ arose.”

Pressure group Index on Censorship welcomed this morning’s ruling. Chief executive John Kampfner said: “The issue at stake here was not the sex lives of celebrities. Serious investigative journalism would have suffered.

“We are pleased that the court acknowledged that Mr Mosley’s move would have inflicted a significant chilling effect on the media.”