Communicated on 6 September 2016
FOURTH SECTION
Application no. 51865/11
STUDIO REPORTIORI and KOMAKHIDZE
against Georgia
lodged on 3 August 2011
STATEMENT OF FACTS
1. Studio Reportiori (“the first applicant”) is a legal entity established under Georgian law on an unspecified date. Mr Vakhtang Komakhidze (“the second applicant”) is a Georgian national who was born in 1964 and lives in Tbilisi. They are represented before the Court by Ms T. Abazadze and N. Katsitadze, lawyers practising in Tbilisi.
2. The first applicant is a non-governmental organisation which was established with the aim of protecting human rights and democracy through conducting journalistic investigations. The second applicant is a journalist and the managing director of the above-mentioned organisation.
3. The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicants, may be summarised as follows.
4. On 19 June 2009 the second applicant, acting in his individual capacity as a journalist, requested the Ministry of Justice to provide him with the information about the sums paid in the form of premiums and bonuses to all high-rank officials of the Ministry starting from 2004 until recently.
5. In its replies of 29 June, 14 and 17 August 2009, the Ministry repeatedly refused to disclose the requested information, consistently explaining that what each individual employee had earned in premiums and bonuses represented personal data and could not be made public without their individual consents. On the other hand, the Ministry communicated to the second applicant information about the amounts that each employee of the Ministry had received in the official salaries and costs and expenses associated with their official business trips in 2008.
6. The second applicant, acting again in his individual journalistic capacity, filed a court action against the Ministry of Justice. The action was dismissed as manifestly ill-founded by the Tbilisi City Court and the Tbilisi Court of Appeals on 15 January and 27 May 2010.
7. The domestic courts stated that the Ministry was entitled to withhold information about the premiums and bonuses paid to its employees, since that information was considered to be personal data and could not thus be disclosed to the public without the consent of the individuals concerned. The courts further suggested that an alternative way was for the second applicant to consult annual property declarations filled in by the relevant public officials of the Ministry. Such a declaration, which was a publicly accessible document, should normally show what a public official earned for each year through all types of lawful incomes, and that global figure would thus normally include in itself any premiums and bonuses received together with the official salaries. It was redundant to oblige the Ministry either to confirm to the public whether any particular employee had received premiums/bonuses or what the exact amounts of those were.
8. A final decision, rejecting the second applicant’s appeal on the points of law and upholding the lower courts’ decisions, was delivered by the Supreme Court on 11 January 2011.
COMPLAINTS
9. The applicants complain under Article 10 of the Convention about the inability to obtain information on the premiums and bonuses paid to the high-rank officials of the Ministry of Justice, which was necessary for conducting their 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 applicants, both the applicant organisation and the second applicant, a right of access to information held by the Ministry of Justice (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. In the affirmative, has there been a violation of the applicants’ right to freedom of expression, in particular their right to receive information, contrary to Article 10 of the Convention?
In particular, to what extent are the duties and responsibilities inherent in the applicants’ journalistic activities relevant to their claim and the State’s margin of appreciation in this field? Was the suggested by the domestic courts manner of obtaining the requisite information through consulting the annual property declarations of the relevant public officials of the Ministry of Justice (see paragraph 7 of the Statement of Facts) a sufficiently adequate alternative?
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy