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The Court of Appeal has ordered that damages of EUR 140,000 awarded in the High Court against the broadcaster TV3 for defaming a lawyer in a news report be reduced to EUR 36,000 (for High Court judgment, see IRIS 2016-1/18). This was the first time the Court of Appeal considered the “Offer to make amends” provision under the Defamation Act 2009. In November 2013, lawyer David Christie was defamed by commercial broadcaster TV3 in a news bulletin reporting a court case which incorrectly identified him as his client, who he was representing in a criminal trial. Two days after the broadcast, Christie...

Through a recent landmark judgment, the Swiss Bundesgericht (Federal Tribunal) strengthened the principle of public court proceedings and the right of the media to effectively monitor the judicial system. The court unanimously upheld a complaint lodged by four journalists following their exclusion from a criminal trial concerning the attempted murder of a man by his wife’s lover. The Zürcher Obergericht (Zurich High Court) had banned the media (and other members of the public) from attending the proceedings and the subsequent sentencing on the grounds that the victim and his two children might...

On 27 March 2017, the Court of Appeal in Paris delivered an interesting judgment involving the right to control over the use made of a person’s image and the right to privacy of a woman involved in a criminal case that was the subject of a ‘docu-fiction’. The television programme at issue was based on a case in which, in 2009, a woman was found guilty of complicity in the murder of her husband and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The programme was constructed using interviews of the people involved in the court case and journalists, and was illustrated with photographs and videos. The woman in...

According to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Iceland has breached the right to freedom of expression of the editor of a web-based media site, by holding him liable for defamation. The applicant in this case is Mr. Ólafsson, editor of the web-based media site Pressan. He published articles alleging that a political candidate (‘A.’) had sexually abused children. The allegations were based on statements made by relatives of ‘A.’ who had declared that he had sexually abused them when they were children. These allegations were also forwarded to the police and the child protection services,...

On 8 February 2017, the High Court refused an application for an order against Facebook Ireland Ltd to identify an anonymous source for defamatory postings on their platforms on the basis that the right to a person’s good name must give way to the right to life and bodily integrity of another in the event of a conflict. In a previous decision in 2016, Justice Binchy had refused the plaintiff, Mr Fred Muwema, certain orders which would have had the effect of requiring Facebook to take down certain defamatory postings concerning him which were posted by a pseudonymous source:“Tom Voltaire Okwalinga”...