Published on 25 September 2023
FIRST SECTION
Application no. 2091/22
Rastislav TRNKA
against Slovakia
lodged on 29 December 2021
communicated on 5 September 2023
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
The application concerns a judicial order to the applicant, at the relevant time a member of a local council in a regional capital, to apologise for statements he had made about another person, who at the relevant time was the mayor of the given city and a member of the national parliament, and to pay the latter 3,000 euros in damages.
The statements in question were made on 30 January 2013 at a press conference called by the applicant, which was followed by a press release, and were linked to contracts under which the municipality had previously let public parking areas to a private party with the aim that that party would operate the paid municipal public parking system in return for a lump sum to be paid yearly to the municipality.
Believing that the terms of these contracts had been disadvantageous for the municipality, in the impugned statements the applicant named the arrangement a carefully prepared con trick (podraz) on citizens and a shady deal (kšeft), mentioning that the mayor may be a schizophrenic, since his attitudes in the national capital and in the given region differed, and indicating the amount of the loss the municipality was going to incur on the basis of the available calculations.
Upon the mayor’s action in libel, the courts noted a distinction between statements of fact and value judgments but went on to examine as the principal criterion whether the applicant’s statements were truthful, placing a burden of the “proof of truth” (dôkaz pravdy) upon the applicant. Having failed to discharge that burden, he was liable for making “untruthful statements of fact” and “untruthful value judgments” to the effect that the claimant had not been acting in the interest of the citizens and that he was schizophrenic. The courts noted that the case involved opposing rights of the claimant’s protection of reputation and the applicant’s freedom of expression, which were to be assessed under the test of proportionality. The claimant’s status played a role only in the assessment of the “value-judgment” part of the applicant’s statements (critique), but had no impact on the need for those statements to be based on facts that were proven and “entirely or significantly undistorted”. The applicant had failed to show that his statements were not of that kind, and this conclusion was not altered by his status of a member of the local council mandated to defend the interests of the citizens.
In its decision of 15 June 2021 (served on the applicant on 30 June 2021), the Constitutional Court rejected the applicant’s constitutional complaint, having noted an issue with the exhaustion of ordinary remedies, but having nevertheless reviewed the substance of his complaint.
The applicant complains that his right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the Convention has been violated.
QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES
1. Has there been a violation of the applicant’s right to freedom of expression, in particular his right to impart information and ideas, contrary to Article 10 of the Convention (see Lopes Gomes da Silva v. Portugal, no. 37698/97, § 33, ECHR 2000-X; Feldek v. Slovakia, no. 29032/95, §§ 83, 85 and 86, ECHR 2001-VIII; Brasilier v. France, no. 71343/01, § 36 and 37, 11 April 2006; Dyuldin and Kislov v. Russia, no. 25968/02, § 49, 31 July 2007, with a further reference; and Lacroix v. France, no. 41519/12, § 40, 7 September 2017)?
2. Having regard to the emphasis that the domestic courts placed on the protection of the claimant’s reputation vis-à-vis the applicant’s right to freedom of speech, have they in fact performed a balancing exercise between the competing interests according to the principles embodied in Article 10 of the Convention (see Ostanina v. Russia, no. 22169/11, § 23, 17 April 2018; Rebechenko v. Russia, no. 10257/17, § 29, 16 April 2019; and, mutatis mutandis, Ringier Axel Springer Slovakia v. Slovakia, no. 41262/05, § 109, 26 July 2011, with further references)?