Communicated on 30 August 2016
FOURTH SECTION
Application no. 18865/11
Nino MIKIASHVILI
against Georgia
lodged on 15 March 2011
STATEMENT OF FACTS
The applicant, Ms Nino Mikiashvili, is a Georgian national, who was born in 1972 and lives in Tbilisi. She is represented before the Court by Ms N. Katsitadze, Ms. M. Uberi and Ms T. Abazadze, lawyers practising in Tbilisi.
The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicant, may be summarised as follows.
The applicant is a journalist. She closely followed a number of high-profile murder cases, regularly writing newspaper articles on them.
On 10 September 2009 she requested the Ministry of Prison to inform her in which custodial institution the convicts in two unrelated high-profile murder cases were serving their prison sentences. That request was conditioned by rumours largely circulated in public by the victims’ families that the convicts had in reality been either murdered in prison a long time before or illicitly allowed by the authorities to leave the country.
By its decisions of 15 and 28 October 2009, the Ministry of Prisons refused to disclose the name of the custodial institutions where the relevant convicts were serving their sentences. The authority explained that the requested information could not be considered as public within the meaning of the General Administrative Code. The authority merely confirmed the fact that those people were still serving their prison sentences pursuant to the relevant criminal convictions.
The applicant then lodged a complaint against the Ministry of Prisons with the Tbilisi City Court. The court dismissed it in a decision of 29 January 2010 as ill-founded, reiterating that since the information she sought directly related to the enforcement of the final court judgments, it could not qualify as public information within the meaning of Article 4 § 3 (c) of the General Administrative Code. The court further added that, in general, the information about the custodial institution in which a convict was serving his or her prison sentence was particularly sensitive and could not be considered as part of the publicly accessible informational domain.
The applicant filed an appeal against the decision of 29 January 2010, complaining that the first instance court misinterpreted the relevant provisions of the General Administrative Code. Her appeal was rejected by the Tbilisi Court of Appeals as manifestly ill-founded on 11 May 2010. A final decision on the matter, rejecting the applicant’s further appeal on points of law, was delivered by the Supreme Court on 10 October 2010.
COMPLAINT
The applicant complains under Article 10 of the Convention about the inability to obtain information from the Ministry of Prisons, which was necessary for conducting her journalistic investigation.
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 applicant, an individual journalist, a right of access to information held by the Ministry of Prisons (compare Roche v. the United Kingdom [GC], no. 32555/96, § 172, ECHR 2005 X with more recent authorities on the matter, such as Társaság a Szabadságjogokért v. Hungary , no. 37374/05, §§ 26 and 27, April 2009, and Österreichische Vereinigung zur Erhaltung, Stärkung und Schaffung v. Austria, no. 39534/07, § 34, 28 November 2013)?
2. Has there been a violation of the applicant’s right to freedom of expression, in particular her right to receive information, contrary to Article 10 of the Convention?
In particular, to what extent are the duties and responsibilities inherent in the applicant’s journalist profession relevant to her claim and the State’s margin of appreciation in this field?
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