Nevertheless there was no recognition of the involuntary nature of the McCann's loss of privacy in the success of the appeal which suggests to me the ignorance of the appeal court judges to the importance of immediate publicity when a child goes missing whether in suspicious circumstances or just lost.
You may have lost me, but I'll have a stab at responding to this anyway.
There are at two quite separate issues here.
One is best procedure in a missing child case, and I'd rather not debate what best practice was in 2007.
The relevant issue is that the incident occurred in Portugal and consequently was subject to Portuguese law. This happens to impose conditions, one being no media. Kate's book made clear media was discussed with the first PJ team, who insisted there was to be no leak to the media.
And members of the Tapas 9 decided they knew better than the PJ so before the group gave first interviews, the media circus was in town.
I have never seen a suggestion the story was first leaked to the media by the Portuguese police, irrespective of what happened later. The simple fact is the genie could not be put back into the lamp.
And that means the police were working in totally unfamiliar mode, so we are never going to find out what would have happened if normal procedure had been applied.