Information Note on the Court’s case-law 212
November 2017
Tarman v. Turkey - 63903/10
Judgment 21.11.2017 [Section II]
Article 8
Positive obligations
Article 8-1
Respect for private life
Domestic courts’ failure to balance freedom of expression against right to protection of reputation: violation
Facts – The applicant was the subject of two press articles describing her as a suicide bomber who was preparing an attack, and including her name and photograph. Her subsequent claims for damages against the two newspapers were dismissed on the grounds that the content of the impugned articles “corresponded to appearances on the date of their publication”.
Law – Article 8: The applicant did not complain about an action on the part of the State, but about a failure by the State to protect her private life against interference by a third party.
In the context of the State’s positive obligations under Article 8, the national authorities had been required to carry out an appropriate balancing exercise, in conformity with the criteria established by the Court’s case-law, between the applicant’s right to respect for her private life and the right of the opposing party to freedom of expression.
However, there had not been a proper balancing exercise in the instant case:
(i) the courts had simply referred to appearances, basing their findings on documents from the file of an ongoing criminal investigation concerning the applicant at the time of publication, without giving a specific classification (statement as a fact or value judgment) to the content of the impugned articles;
(ii) the judgments did not provide a satisfactory response to the question of whether freedom of the press could, in the present case, justify the interference with the applicant’s right to the protection of her reputation that had arisen through the content and form of the impugned articles, in which the applicant’s identity had been divulged, her photograph had been published and she had been described as a dangerous terrorist, although the suspicions against her in the criminal investigation file had been of a different nature.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41: EUR 1,500 in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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