Yes to father-daughter wiretapping, the right to report prevails

Yes to thepublication of the transcripts ofphone interceptions made in the course of an investigation into conversations between a woman and her father, a former French minister. The European Court of Human Rights, in its judgment Charki v. France (28473/22), has no doubts in reinforcing the freedom of the press and the right of the public to be informed on matters of general interest, rejecting the appeal of the woman who claimed that her right to respect for her private life had been violated.

In the course of the investigation into the then President Sarkozy's campaign financing by the Libyan regime, the plaintiff's father, a well-known politician, had been intercepted. On the website of Le Monde and then in the same newspaper, two journalists had published the intercepts, including those with his daughter on the affair. The woman had initiated legal action, demanding compensation of EUR 50,000, the destruction of the material in the journalists' possession and the deletion of the articles from the internet. All domestic appeals had been rejected and the woman turned to Strasbourg, which also proved her wrong, considering that there was no violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private and family life.

The Strasbourg Court acknowledged that the publication of the transcripts had compromised the woman's right to privacy because personal conversations with her father had also been revealed and that the publication on the web had certainly amplified their scope. Having said this, however, the Court emphasised the circumstance that these were matters of general interest and that the interceptions were not the result of clandestine surveillance but had been authorised by the investigating judge. The journalists' aim was not to divulge private matters, but to inform on topics of general interest. Moreover, the publication of the interceptions had not gone beyond what was necessary to ensure the information of the public and had not been disproportionate to the objective pursued.

The national judges, then, in rejecting the woman's appeal and in agreeing with the journalists, also in the light of Strasbourg's own case law, considered as relevant factors the contribution of the publication to the debate of general interest, the degree of notoriety of the plaintiff, and the subject matter, content and form of the publication. There is no doubt, for Strasbourg, that political and judicial information concerns information of general importance that goes far beyond the mere curiosity of a particular readership.

It is true, then, that the daughter was not known to the general public and that conversations revealed personal aspects, but the woman 'could not be regarded as an ordinary person who did not attract media attention'. The daughter of the former politician who was investigated and later convicted was uninvolved in political and judicial affairs, but for the European Court it was inevitable that she would be more exposed to the media than an 'ordinary person' because she also had business connections with her father. The journalists, moreover, while publishing the 'faithful transcript of the dialogue' with her father, had been careful not to publish details of the woman's 'strictly private' life and had acted within the parameters of responsible journalism.