Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 119
May 2009
Pipi v. Turkey - 4020/03
Decision 12.5.2009 [Section II]
Article 8
Article 8-1
Respect for private life
Press article and television programme calling into question businessman’s reputation: inadmissible
At the material time the applicant was an agent in show-business and a partner in a private limited production company. In 2000, following a complaint filed against him for issuing a cheque without sufficient funds on behalf of the production company, he paid off the debt and all proceedings against him were dropped. A few days later the daily newspaper Star published an article under the heading “M.A.E. saves Pipis from property seizure”. It was illustrated by three photographs showing the applicant with his partner M.A.E. accompanied by four ladies and with his girlfriend, E.G., a famous singer. On the same day, on the television programme “Paparazzi”, broadcast by the channel Interstar, the applicant’s situation was also mentioned in a voice-over commentary.
The applicant demanded, unsuccessfully, the publication of a correction by the Star newspaper, arguing that the comments published had been misleading and defamatory. The Justice of the Peace upheld the applicant’s claim to use his right of reply on the ground that the offending article had not been based on any evidence in support of the comments, which he found “demeaning”. An appeal by the Star was dismissed. However, the correction demanded by the applicant was never published. He brought a similar claim before the Justice of the Peace against the channel Interstar but it was dismissed on the ground that he had not adduced any “real evidence or document capable of proving that the comments broadcasted were not truthful”. His appeal was dismissed. The applicant also filed two compensation claims for non-pecuniary damage before the District Court, one against the publishing company and editor-in-chief of the Star, the other against the channel Interstar. Both actions were dismissed in judgments which were upheld by the Court of Cassation.
Inadmissible: No issue arose in connection with the photographs and pictures that illustrated the offending article and programme, because they were already in the public domain and, in any event, did not concern details of the applicant’s private life. As regards the actual article and programme, they had involved a series of speculations based on a judicial development, reported in a rumour-type manner that was typical of the kind of media concerned, but the information in question did not concern purely personal details of the applicant’s life, nor was it the result of an intolerable or ongoing intrusion into his private life. Such information had not constituted, for the applicant’s private life, an interference serious enough for his person integrity to be impugned. The only thing that might have been affected was his reputation, the protection of which was precisely one of the limits to freedom of expression under Article 10 § 2 of the Convention. It thus remained for the Court to examine the position taken by the domestic courts on that issue.
In the present case, the District Court, on two occasions, had taken the view that the information contained in the article published by the Star and in the programme broadcast by the channel Interstar related to subject matter that fell within the press’ duty to impart information, and that there had been no infringement of the applicant’s personality rights, there being no illegality causing non-pecuniary damage. Without dealing specifically with the question whether that information amounted to “statements of fact” or “value judgments”, the courts considered that it had been “in substance, correct” because it had come from official files in cases opened against the applicant by the prosecutor’s office and the executions bureau. In the courts’ opinion, there had therefore been a sufficient factual basis to justify the comments in questions and, consequently, there was no cause to penalise those that had made such comments. That interpretation was justifiable even though the offending article and programme contained some statements about which nothing could be found in the official files in question. This situation might be open to criticism in terms of ethics in journalism, but the Court regarded it rather as reflecting the “degree of exaggeration” that was permitted in the context of journalistic freedom. There was therefore nothing to suggest that the District Court had overstepped its margin of appreciation when it had attributed less weight to the applicant’s right to the protection of his private life, within the meaning of Article 8, in balancing the competing interests of the media in question in the light of Article 10 of the Convention: manifestly ill-founded.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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