Source: https://strasbourgobservers.com/2016/06/16/furst-pfeifer-v-austria-a-one-sided-unbalanced-and-fundamentally-unjust-judgment/?replytocom=67378
Timestamp: 2019-06-17 02:53:17
Document Index: 488784978

Matched Legal Cases: ['art. 8', '§54', '§40', 'art. 10', '§ 107', '§ 108']

Fürst-Pfeifer v Austria: “A one-sided, unbalanced and fundamentally unjust judgment”? | Strasbourg Observers
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Fürst-Pfeifer v Austria: “A one-sided, unbalanced and fundamentally unjust judgment”?
June 16, 2016 June 16, 2016 Stijn Smet Conflicting Rights, Fürst-Pfeifer v Austria, Freedom of Expression, Right to Private Life
In Fürst-Pfeifer v Austria, the majority of the Fourth Section of the ECtHR ruled that the applicant’s right to private life was outweighed by the freedom of expression of an online publication and offline newspaper. In one of the fiercest and most poignant dissenting opinions I have read to date, judges Wojtyczek and Kūris label the majority judgment as “a one-sided, unbalanced and … fundamentally unjust judgment” that “panders to prejudice” against persons, like the applicant, “with a history of mental-health problems”. In this post, I consider the majority judgment in Fürst-Pfeifer as symptomatic of a broader problem in the Court’s case law: one-sided balancing in the resolution of conflicts between human rights. I tackle this problem, along with others, in my forthcoming book Resolving Conflicts between Human Rights: The Judge’s Dilemma (Routledge, 2016).
The applicant in Fürst-Pfeifer, Ms Gabriele Fürst-Pfeifer, is a psychiatrist who also works as a court expert in custody and contact-rights-related disputes. She is specialised in the psychological examination of children and adolescents. In 2008, an article in an online publication and weekly regional newspaper disclosed details on Ms. Fürst-Pfeifer’s mental health history. The article mentioned her previous “[s]uffering from up-and-down mood swings, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts and hallucinations, together with paranoid ideas – but working as a court-appointed expert”.
In its judgment, the majority of the Fourth Section reiterates the Court’s established principle that, where the right to private life and freedom of expression have to be balanced against each other, both rights in principle deserve equal respect. Yet, after stating the principle, the majority takes a somewhat bizarre turn in finding that “notwithstanding the fact that the applicant claims a violation of Article 8 … the Court has to determine whether the principles inherent to Article 10 were properly applied by the Austrian courts” (para. 42). Although the case was brought to Strasbourg under the right to private life, the majority would thus examine it from the viewpoint of freedom of expression. To the best of my knowledge, Fürst-Pfeifer is the second judgment in which the Court does this. The first was Karakó v Hungary. In both judgments, the ‘transformation’ of an Article 8 case into an Article 10 case was the precursor to a finding of no violation of the right to private life.
Here, the Polish and Lithuanian judge lay the finger on what is arguably a festering wound in the Court’s approach to balancing. In resolving conflicts between human rights, such as at issue in Fürst-Pfeifer, the Court tends to resort to open ended balancing. Although this grants the Court’s judges great flexibility in tailoring the balancing test to the particular circumstances of the case at hand, therein also lies the danger. Judges, as evidenced in the majority judgment in Fürst-Pfeifer, can more or less freely decide which factors they will include in the balancing exercise, and – equally importantly – which ones they will leave out.
From the perspective of the dissenting judges, “the Court’s attitude in the present case is in shockingly downright opposition to that in Bédat”. Importantly, Bédat raised somewhat analogous issues to those at stake in Fürst-Pfeifer, with one key difference: the Grand Chamber had ruled against freedom of expression (for a critical view on Bédat, see this post by Dirk Voorhoof). A core element of the Court’s reasoning in Bédat was the concept of ‘responsible journalism’. “Surprisingly”, the dissenting judges in Fürst-Pfeifer find, “the notion of responsible journalism is not mentioned at all in the present judgment”.
The Polish and Lithuanian judge further point to a number of other balancing factors that were deemed relevant by the Court in previous judgments, but are disregarded by the majority in Fürst-Pfeifer. One such element is the centrality of the protection of health data to the right to private life. The dissenting judges find that “the selectivity and off-handedness of the majority’s employment of the Court’s case-law manifests itself again” when the majority in Fürst-Pfeifer fails to reference cases like Z v Finland and Armonienė v Lithuania, on the disclosure of persons’ HIV status.
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4 thoughts on “Fürst-Pfeifer v Austria: “A one-sided, unbalanced and fundamentally unjust judgment”?”
van meerbeeck says:
As far as I’m concerned, balancing will always leave some room for unpredictability but that’s not the point i want to make here.
I think it’s abolutely fundamental to underline the fact that, since 2011 (MGN), the Court considers that where the national authorities have, in a conflict between two rights protected by the Convention (at least art. 8 and 10), “weighed up the interests at stake in compliance with the criteria laid down in the Court’s case-law, strong reasons are required if it is to substitute its view for that of the domestic courts” (Bedat, §54, see also Furst, §40).
Since then, the Court takes a “subsidiarity” approach and only (at least, that’s what the Court says it does) finds a violation when the national assessment is clearly wrong.
I believe this explains judgments like Bédat or Fürst-Pfeifer, where no violation has been found.
that is an excellent point, thank you! Although I do not deal with subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation in this short post, I agree with your conclusion. While first reading the dissenting opinion in Fürst-Pfeifer, I also thought that the Court’s emphasis on subsidiarity (“strong reasons to substitute its views”) in relation to human rights conflicts may very well explain why it found no violation in Fürst-Pfeifer and in Bédat. There is, indeed, no *inevitable* contradiction here.
Case Comment, Strasbourg: Fürst-Pfeifer v Austria: “A one-sided, unbalanced and fundamentally unjust judgment”? – Stijn Smet | Inforrm's Blog says:
[Comment by Dirk Voorhoof]
Dear Stijn and Jéremie,
I agree with your shared consideration that there is no ‘inevitable’ contradiction between the finding (by 4/3) in Fürst-Pfeifer v. Austria (no violation of the right to privacy because of art. 10 impact) and in (Grand Chamber, 15/2) Bédat v. Switzerland (no violation of the right to freedom of expression, because of article 8 impact). Because of the wider margin of appreciation for the member states and/or the emphasis on the subsidiary role of the European Court of Human Rights in such ‘balancing’-cases, it can make a difference in practice indeed whether an application has been lodged for alleged breach of Article 8 (like in Fürst-Pfeifer v. Austria) or alleged violation of Article 10 ECHR (Bédat v. Switzerland). As the Court has reiterated on many occasions: in such circumstances “where the balancing exercise has been undertaken by the national authorities in conformity with the criteria laid down in the Court’s case-law, the Court would require strong reasons to substitute its view for that of the domestic courts” (see Grand Chamber in Von Hannover v. Germany (no. 2), § 107). Because of the wider margin of appreciation left to the member states, inherently the risk is to create a broader set of outcomes of this balancing exercises between Article 8 and Article 10, as it requires ‘strong reasons’ for the Court to disagree with the national courts findings. As a consequence, it leaves the member states a wide autonomy whether they finally give more or less weight in the application of the relevant criteria put forward by the ECtHR in such kind of cases, and this on its turn may lead to very different outcomes at national level, in some cases or countries giving strong protection to Article 10 interests, while in other cases or countries giving more weight to the interests related to the right of privacy under Article 8 ECHR. Unless ‘strong reasons’ the ECtHR will not find a violation, nor of Article 8, neither of Article 10. It means that very similar situations might lead to an opposite outcome at national level, without this being strictly monitored and eventually corrected any longer by the ECtHR.
Is such an ‘inevitable’ consequence not in contradiction with another principle put forward by the European Court itself in this kind of cases, namely that in cases “which require the right to respect for private life to be balanced against the right to freedom of expression, the Court considers that the outcome of the application should not, in theory, vary according to whether it has been lodged with the Court under Article 8 of the Convention, by the person who was the subject of the article, or under Article 10 by the publisher”? (Grand Chamber in Von Hannover v. Germany (no. 2), § 108). In other words isn’t there an ‘inevitable’ contradiction between what the Court proclaims “in theory” regarding the balancing of Article 8 and 10, and what the consequences of this balancing approach are in reality?
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