Search results : 978

On 12 January 2017, The Hague District Court refused an applicant’s request to order Google Inc. to remove ten hyperlinks from its search engine results. The search results concerned the applicant, a real-estate entrepreneur against whom a criminal investigation had been conducted in 2005 for mortgage fraud. Of the ten search results which were allegedly shown when the applicant’s name was entered in Google Search, two had already been removed by Google. A further five search results had not been obtained by entering the applicant’s name; therefore the Court only considered the three remaining...

On 24 February 2017, the Dutch Supreme Court handed down its first application of the EU Court of Justice’s Google Spain judgment (see IRIS 2014-6:1/3). The Supreme Court overturned lower judgments, holding that rights based on Articles 7 (private life) and 8 (personal data) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in principle outweigh not only the economic rights of search engines, but also the “justified interests” of internet users to access search results. The judgment follows earlier proceedings in lower courts (see IRIS 2014-10/25 and IRIS 2015-5/25), and concerns the following...

On 17 February 2017, the Minister for Justice and Equality established a statutory Tribunal of Inquiry to investigate allegations made by Irish police officers under Ireland’s whistleblower law, the Protected Disclosures Act 2014. Of particular importance is the fact that the Tribunal’s terms of reference include investigating certain aspects relating to the Irish media. First, the Tribunal will examine a police officer’s allegation that he was directed “to contact the media to brief them negatively” against a police whistleblower, to brief the media that the officer “was motivated by malice and...

On 25 January 2017, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a new Resolution entitled “Online media and journalism: challenges and accountability”. The Resolution begins with some general observations on the benefits and risks associated with new online media. On the one hand, the Resolution notes new online media “create[s] more media pluralism”, offers everybody the possibility to disseminate information and views to the public at large, and enables the public to become aware of human rights violations in places that attract little media attention. However, the Assembly...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has, once again, clarified that media freedom and entertainment news must respect the right of privacy of individuals, including when commenting on the private life of media celebrities. The case of Rubio Dosamantes v. Spain deals with an application by the Mexican pop singer whose artist name is Paulina Rubio, complaining that her reputation and private life had been harmed by remarks in various Spanish TV programmes. The ECtHR held that the dismissal of Dosamantes’ claims by the Spanish courts was a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention...