Communicated on 14 September 2016
FOURTH SECTION
Application no. 41192/11
Mzia AMAGHLOBELI and others
against Georgia
lodged on 29 June 2011
STATEMENT OF FACTS
1. Ms Mzia Amaghlobeli (“the first applicant”) and Ms Eter Turadze (“the second applicant”) are Georgian nationals who were born in 1975 and 1972 respectively and live in Tbilisi. The weekly newspaper Batumelebi (“the third applicant”) is a legal entity established under the Georgian law on an unspecified date, with the head office situated in Batumi. All three applicants are represented by Ms T. Abazadze, a lawyer practising in Georgia.
2. The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicants, may be summarised as follows.
3. The first and second applicants are journalists. They are, respectively, the managing director and the chief editor at the Batumelebi, the third applicant.
4. In 2009 the third applicant’s office started receiving complaints from the local population about arbitrary customs clearance practices allegedly conducted by Georgian customs officers at the checkpoint in Sarpi, on the State border between Turkey and Georgia (“the Sarpi checkpoint”). The first and second applicants decided to respond to those calls by conducting a journalistic enquiry.
5. On 15 August 2005 the first and second applicants crossed the State border. After having interviewed vendors at a local market on the Turkish side, who confirmed that Georgian customers had recently become reluctant to buy expensive goods in Turkey for fear of paying excessive customs duties, the applicants headed back. Having passed through the passport control at the Sarpi checkpoint, they witnessed, in the restricted cargo zone, to a verbal altercation between a Georgian national and a customs officer over the amount of duties payable for an import. The applicants presented themselves as journalists and started interviewing the quarrelling individual by recording him with a dictaphone. The customs officer requested the applicants to stop recording and immediately quit the restricted zone. The latter refused. The officer eventually fined the first and second applicants 1,000 Georgian Laris each (around 400 Euros) for disobedience to his lawful order (Article 245 § 1 of the Customs Code).
6. The first and second applicants, acting in their individual capacity, contested the administrative fines in a court. Among other arguments, they referred to their journalistic freedom to receive information by interviewing people of their choice. They complained that the customs officer’s order to leave the cargo zone of the Sarpi checkpoint and the subsequent fines had disproportionately interfered with that freedom.
7. The two applicants’ complaint was rejected as manifestly ill-founded by the Tbilisi City Court and the Tbilisi Court of Appeals on 4 February and 22 June 2010 respectively. With respect to the applicants’ argument about their freedom to gather information necessary for the preparation of their journalistic investigation, the courts noted that they were not allowed to effectuate audio and/or video recording in the secure cargo zone of the checkpoint without having received a prior authorisation from the officers in charge. In any event, the applicants could have gathered the necessary information at the Sarpi checkpoint by other, less intrusive means. Notably, the court suggested that they could have interviewed the people at the exit of the checkpoint rather than inside, in the restricted zone.
8. By a decision of 29 December 2010, the Supreme Court rejected the first and second applicants’ appeal on the points of law as inadmissible.
COMPLAINTS
9. All three applicants complain under Article 10 of the Convention about the unjustified interference with their journalistic freedom to interview people in order to collect information necessary for their journalistic enquiry.
QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES
1. Can Article 10 of the Convention be said, in the light of the factual circumstances of the present case, to guarantee the applicants, two individual journalists and the weekly newspaper, a right to collect information by recording interviews in the restricted (cargo) zone of the border checkpoint?
2. Has the third applicant, the newspaper Batumelebi, exhausted all effective domestic remedies for its complaint under Article 10 of the Convention, as required by Article 35 § 1?
3. In the affirmative, has there been a violation of all three applicants’ rights to freedom of expression, in particular their rights to receive information, contrary to Article 10 of the Convention? In this respect, according to which domestic legal provision the cargo zone of a border checkpoint is considered to be a restricted zone?
4. To what extent were the duties and responsibilities inherent in the applicants’ journalist activities relevant to their claim and the State’s margin of appreciation in this field?
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy