The European human rights court on Tuesday rejected an invasion-of-privacy complaint by Princess Caroline of Monaco, one of two potentially groundbreaking rulings that uphold the media’s right to report on celebrities.
In both verdicts the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, referred to the often-tricky balance between the media’s right to expression and an individual’s right to privacy.
Princess Caroline and her husband, Prince Ernst August von Hanover, had filed a complaint with the court alleging that their privacy rights had been violated in Germany in 2002 after the publication by Frau im Spiegel magazine of a photo of the couple during a skiing holiday — a time when her father, Prince Rainier, was ailing.
A German court had initially upheld the media’s right to report on how the royal family was coping with Rainier’s illness, and how his children “reconciled their obligations of family solidarity with the legitimate needs of their private life.”
The Strasbourg court upheld that ruling, saying Princess Caroline and her lawyers “had not provided any evidence that the photos had been taken in a climate of general harassment, as they had alleged, or that they had been taken secretly.”
The second ruling issued Tuesday involved a Hamburg court’s injunction in 2005 to stop Axel Springer, the publishing house behind the German daily Bild, from publishing articles about a well-known television star who was arrested on charges of cocaine possession. A federal court in Germany later upheld the injunction.
The E.C.H.R. said Tuesday that the German courts violated the right of expression, and affirmed the “public interest” of some Bild articles in 2004 and 2005 about a nationally known star who long portrayed a police superintendent on TV.
The court noted that the actor, which it did not identify, had been arrested in a public place — the Munich Beer Festival. It said that Bild had also received its information from German officials, and that there was no evidence to indicate the newspaper had acted in “bad faith.”
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