Guy Black was speaking after allegations that Cox, who said that the pictures had 'ruined all memories of my honeymoon', had failed to get sufficient redress from the PCC and so had to go to court.
On Friday it was announced that Cox will receive £50,000 in damages from the People, which published the pictures, and the photographic agent who brokered the sale of the pictures, Jason Fraser.
The People, part of the Mirror Group of newspapers, and Fraser will also have to pay legal costs for the case which are expected to total more than £200,000.
Black pointed out that the PCC had successfully negotiated an apology, which the People ran the week following the publication of the pictures, in agreement with Cox.
The DJ announced the next day that she was taking legal action, which meant that the PCC had to withdraw from the case.
'The PCC was forced to bail out,' Black said. 'To say the PCC's sanctions are ineffective is to misunderstand that we didn't even get the opportunity to declare [a sanction]. It is a red herring the size of a killer shark to say that this is a blow for the PCC.'
The People published the pictures of Cox on honeymoon in the Seychelles in October 2001. Her agent complained to the PCC the next day that it was a gross breach of her privacy.
'If people want money it has always to be clear they will have to go to court to get it,' Black said. 'There will always be a handful of celebrities who want that.
'But in the vast majority of cases people don't want money, they want it to be sorted out effectively.'
Yesterday, critics of the PCC said that the payout revealed that the courts were more effective than the PCC at protecting privacy by way of the Human Rights Act.
But Black rejected calls for self-regulation of the newspaper industry to be scrapped in favour of new privacy laws.
'The PCC was set up a dispute resolution body,' he said.
'It was never meant to be a watered down version of the legal system. The moment you have a body with fines and compensation you bring in lawyers and it ceases to be accessible to ordinary people who make up 95 per cent of our complainants.'
He said that the present sanctions system, where papers have to publish PCC adjudications, worked and that newspaper standards had improved enormously over the past decade.
Senior media figures defended the PCC's role yesterday.
'The Sara Cox award seems to be more bad news for a suddenly beleaguered Press Complaints Commission,' said Peter Preston, former editor of the Guardian and media commentator.
'But in reality the Cox outcome may prove as much good news as bad. The courts are coming to treat the PCC's code itself as the basis of an ad hoc privacy law - and the fact that the People had already lost at the PCC is surely what destroyed its legal defences here. That doesn't weaken the self-regulatory code, just the reverse.'
