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On 26 June 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered an interesting judgment in support of investigative journalism, criticising the Romanian authorities’ negligence in allowing leaks of secret, sensitive military information. The ECtHR found that the criminal prosecution of a journalist and the measures taken against him for disclosing classified information that gave evidence of the leaks, violated the journalist’s right to freedom of expression as guaranteed under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The applicant is Marian Gîrleanu, a local correspondent...

On 25 July 2018, Amsterdam District Court ruled that both a Twitter user and GeenStijl, a popular Dutch website (see IRIS 2016-9/3), acted unlawfully by disseminating, without her consent, sexually explicit (video) material of a well-known Dutch TV personality and singer. The content, which had been made in private by the claimant, had, for unclear reasons, appeared and circulated on the messaging service WhatsApp. The Twitter user had subsequently posted a tweet that contained the content, accompanied by a hashtag with the name of the claimant. GeenStijl, for a short period of time, referred to...

On 24 May 2018, the Data Protection Act 2018 was enacted following publication of the Data Protection Bill in February 2018 (see IRIS 2018-3/21) and the General Scheme of the Bill in May 2017 (see IRIS 2017-7/22). The purpose of the 2018 Act is to give further effect to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679) (GDPR), which became applicable in all member states on 25 May 2018 (see IRIS 2018-6/7). While the GDPR is directly applicable, a number of its provisions require member states to enact domestic legislation, and 25 May 2018 was also the deadline for member states...

In 2017, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched a formal investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes, and the investigation is expected to continue until October 2018. On 11 July 2018, the ICO published a progress report as well as a second report, Democracy Disrupted: Personal information and political influence, which sets out a number of policy recommendations arising from the investigation so far. Of the actions detailed by the progress report, the most high-profile is the one against Facebook. The ICO issued a Notice of Intent to fine it GBP500 000, the...

Sir Cliff Richard OBE (Sir Cliff), a popular singer whose career spans over 50 years, was awarded damages and costs in the High Court of Justice against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their infringement of his privacy during a South Yorkshire Police (SYP) investigation against him concerning an alleged historic sex crime which was not pursued. Mr Justice Mann presided over a twelve-day trial during which he balanced Sir Cliff’s right to privacy flowing from Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) introduced into English law by the Human Rights Act 1998 (the Act)...