Search results : 147

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has added a new wagon to its locomotive judgment in the case of Goodwin v. United Kingdom (IRIS 1996-4:1/4) on the protection of journalistic sources. The recent judgment in the case of Klaudia Csikós v. Hungary summarises and applies the court’s case law robustly protecting journalistic sources against secret surveillance by the police or other government agencies (see also Sergey Sorokin v. Russia, IRIS 2022-9:1/17 and Big Brother Watch a.o. v. the United Kingdom, IRIS 2021-7:1/20). The ECtHR found that the Hungarian authorities failed to...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered an interesting judgment on the impact of the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) within private relations and the positive obligation of the authorities to safeguard the right to freedom of expression and information in contractual relations. The ECtHR unanimously found that imposing a fine on an actor for having disclosed confidential information about the terms of his contract with a TV company, did not violate the actor’s freedom of expression. The Court held that the dissemination...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found a violation of the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in a case concerning the sharing of a Facebook post criticising a municipality. The case started in 2014 when K. published a post on his Facebook page calling on the inhabitants of Tata, a town in the northwest of Hungary, to participate in a demonstration as a protest against the sale of a building belonging to the Tata municipality. According to K. the building was sold for an unreasonably low price to a local businessman, who...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has delivered an interesting judgment that further clarifies the application of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) on the right to access public documents containing personal data. Although the ECtHR found that the protection of personal information of grant beneficiaries constituted a legitimate aim for refusing access to such data, it emphasised that the information request by a journalist aiming to contribute to transparency in the allocation of taxpayers’ money, clearly satisfied the public interest test. The ECtHR...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered a judgment in a case concerning the decision by Hungarian courts to order the Internet news portal Index.hu to pay compensation for having published a story recounted by a third person, which the domestic courts found to have been false and defamatory. The ECtHR considered the imposition of objective liability on Index.hu for the reproduction of the statements, irrespective of whether the author or publisher acted in good or bad faith and in compliance with journalistic duties and obligations, to be a violation of Index.hu’s right of journalistic...