Human Rights Court confirms judgment against journalists
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Switzerland did not violate the right to freedom of expression by convicting a journalist. In a report on a car accident, the journalist had quoted from police and prosecutor’s interrogation transcripts.
The ruling in the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice is final and was made by 15 votes to two, as announced by the Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) on Tuesday. The article in the magazine L'Illustré concerned a car driver who crashed onto the sidewalk of the Grand-Pont bridge in Lausanne in 2003. Three people died and seven were injured. According to the FOJ, the text caused quite a stir at the time. The driver was later found guilty of multiple murder and attempted murder and sentenced to imprisonment for insanity.
Statements revealed
The journalist revealed statements that the accused person responsible for the accident had made to the investigating judge and the police. He had received the information anonymously and considered it appropriate to make it public, he argued. In the canton of Vaud, the journalist was fined CHF 4,000 in 2005 for violating the ban on publishing official secret proceedings. The Federal Supreme Court upheld this ruling in 2008, but on July 1, 2014, a chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg ruled by four votes to three that the journalist's sentence violated his right to freedom of expression. The Swiss authorities referred this ruling to the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR. This chamber has now largely confirmed the government's argumentation, the FOJ wrote on Tuesday. In the case of the article in L'Illustré, the Grand Chamber came to the conclusion that the form and content could not be justified by the public's need for information about the accident.
Personal rights also violated
Only a qualified public interest justifies the publication of official secret documents. This was not the case, especially as the responsible authorities had reported regularly on the investigations from the outset. The article in question had only appeared months after the accident. Based on the ruling, the FOJ went on to say that the text also violated the personal rights of the accused driver and the presumption of innocence. In addition, the functioning of the criminal justice system would be jeopardized if trial transcripts were published during proceedings. (SDA)
