Stars' wedding 'was all about £1m OK! deal'

Security surrounding the wedding of Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas was aimed at securing a £1m picture contract and had nothing to do with the couple's right to privacy, it was claimed in the High Court yesterday.

The couple are suing Hello! in a £2m claim after unauthorised pictures of their November 2000 wedding appeared in the celebrity magazine. OK! magazine had signed a £1m deal with the stars for an exclusive picture deal, but was beaten on to the streets by Hello! which used pictures taken by a gatecrasher to the New York ceremony.

The defendants claim the Douglases can never win their action because there is no right of privacy outside the European Convention on Human Rights. James Price QC, representing Hello! and its proprietor Eduardo Sanchez Junco, recalled comments when the Court of Appeal overturned injunctions stopping publication of the pictures.

He said Lord Justice Buxton had questioned whether preferring one's wedding pictures in one publication rather than another should be deserving of protection by the law. The Douglases were not trying to protect their right of privacy but to protect exclusive contractual rights conferred on OK!, he said. It was "inconceivable" that the European Court of Human Rights would find that rights to privacy had been infringed where the couple had sold photographic rights for syndication worldwide. Mr Price says the Douglases' claim for £500,000 and the financial losses of £1.75m claimed by OK! were "disproportionate" and "contrary to good sense".

On the second day of the trial Michael Tugendhat QC, representing the Douglases, said Hello! lawyers claimed a wedding attended by 350 guests could never be described as private. "The notion that you can't have a private event because 350 people are present is so bizarre I have difficulty in addressing it," he said.

The hearing continues.