Dacre became chairman of the PCC's Editors' Code of Practice Committee in April 2008. On 9 November 2008, Dacre gave a speech to the Society of Editors Conference in Bristol in which he was critical of the emerging pressures for privacy laws following the conclusion of the Max Mosley libel case against the "News of the World" and Mr Justice Eady's closing remarks. According to Dacre, Eady had "effectively ruled that it was perfectly acceptable for" Mosley "to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him" which is "the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard". Should the government want "to force a privacy law", the bill would need to go through the parliamentary stages, "withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes", Dacre said. "Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen". Referring to a case in 2006 where Eady had blocked the publication of a married man's account of his wife's seduction by a prominent figure involved in sport, Dacre said "the judge - in an unashamed reversal of centuries of moral and social thinking - placed the rights of the adulterer above society's age-old belief that adultery should be condemned". If newspapers, which "devote considerable space" to "public affairs, don't have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process".