Ex-motorsports boss Max Mosley has lost his European Court of Human Rights bid to force newspapers to warn people before exposing their private lives.

The verdict in Strasbourg marked the final stage in his campaign for tighter privacy laws.

In 2008, the UK High Court awarded him £60,000 damages after ruling the News of the World invaded his right to privacy by reporting on his sex life.

Victory might have led to new privacy laws, which press bosses oppose.

Mr Mosley had argued financial damages could not restore his reputation following the front-page article and pictures about his meeting with five prostitutes in a London flat.

He pursued the case to the Human Rights Court, challenging UK privacy laws which allow publication without giving targets advanced warning.

He was aggrieved that he had not been made aware of the paper's intention to publish and so never had the chance to apply for an injunction to stop the story.

At the European court, lawyers for Mr Mosley, now 71, argued that money was not a sufficient remedy for the loss of a person's privacy.

They say newspapers should be made to notify the subject of a story before they run it.

This would give them time to seek a court order from a judge to stop the story being published.

Speaking before the verdict, Mr Mosley said once a story is out there - regardless of whether it is true or not - the damage is done

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Once they've published it, you can't un-publish it, you can't take it out of the public mind.

"And worse than that... you recover damages if you win; you get your costs awarded, again if you win; but the costs and the damages are less than the bill from your solicitor.

"So you get the whole publicity repeated again in open court, on top of which you get a very large bill."

Mr Mosley's lawyers said the failure of UK law to oblige newspapers to notify people before exposing their private lives violated the European Human Rights Convention, to which Britain is a signatory.

If judges had supported Mr Mosley's case, the government may have had to reinforce privacy laws, compelling editors to go to celebrities or public figures at the heart of a story before running it.

Freedom of expression
The move would have fuelled the row over the use of super-injunctions to protect certain people, usually celebrities, from the media spotlight.

The government has said current UK rules strike a good balance between the "right to private life" and the "right to freedom of expression".

Newspaper bosses say imposing "pre-publication notification" to toughen the "right to private life" would amount to a breach of the "right to freedom of expression".

Mr Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation, had insisted his legal case did not threaten press freedom because "in 99 cases out of 100, if they (newspapers) are going to write something about someone of any great interest they will approach the person".

But the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Lady Buscombe, said she had "real concerns" about the restrictions injunctions placed on investigating wrongdoing.

She told the BBC it would be a "diminution of our democracy, never mind our freedom of expression" if they could be gained every time somebody sought to block stories from being printed.