Europe court rules Dutch police violated publication’s right to protect sources

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Europe court rules Dutch police violated publication’s right to protect sources

September 15, 2010 08:25:26 am

[JURIST] Police in the Netherlands violated a Dutch magazine’s right to free expression by compelling disclosure of documentary evidence relating to anonymous sources, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled [judgment text] Tuesday. The unanimous ruling centered around a 2002 feature on illegal street racing published in the Dutch edition of Autoweek [media website, in Dutch], a property of Sanoma Uitgevers. The magazine’s editorial staff promised anonymity to members of an underground racing group to gain access to a late-night race in the Dutch town of Hoorn, including photographs and interviews. Police suspected one of the cars appearing in the photos of being used as a getaway car in a string of bank robberies and demanded the magazine turn over all of the pictures the photographer had taken. When Autoweek refused, authorities arrested Editor-in-Chief Tonie Broekhuijsen. The magazine ultimately turned over a CD containing photographs taken at the race to Dutch prosecutors and filed suit seeking its return. The Dutch Supreme Court [official website, in Dutch] affirmed the state’s right to the pictures. The ECHR panel said that the confiscation of the CD violated Article 10 of the Euorpean Convention on Human Rights [materials], which provides “the freedom … to receive and impart information without interference by public authority.” In a statement [text], the court said the process by which the Netherlands compelled disclosure of the pictures was “deficient”:

The most important safeguard [against violation of free expression rights] was the guarantee of review by a judge or other independent and impartial decision-making body. It should be carried out by a body separate from the executive and other interested parties, invested with the power to determine whether a requirement in the public interest overriding the principle of protection of journalistic sources existed prior to the handing over of such material and to prevent unnecessary access to information capable of disclosing the sources’ identity if it did not. … In the Netherlands … that decision was entrusted to the public prosecutor rather than an independent judge. In terms of procedure the public prosecutor was a “party”, who could hardly be seen as objective and impartial.

In an Autoweek report [text, in Dutch] Tuesday, which reprinted the photos and an excerpt of the original story, Broekhuijsen said, “It’s a matter of principle, and I am very pleased with this ruling.”

Many recent disputes have arisen over freedom of the press in Europe, with the ECHR at the center of a number of them. Also Tuesday, the tribunal ruled [JURIST report] that Turkey failed to protect the life of well-known Turkish-American writer and journalist Hrant Dink [BBC obituary; JURIST news archive], failed to adequately investigate his murder and infringed on his right to freedom of expression. Dink, editor of the newspaper Agos [media website] was killed [JURIST report] in January 2007 after law enforcement officials had been informed that an assassination was likely but did not act on the information. In April, the ECHR ordered the government of Azerbaijan [JURIST report] to secure the immediate release of imprisoned Azeri journalist Eynulla Fatuallyev, who was jailed on what many international organizations claim are spurious charges. Last October, the court ruled that Turkish authorities violated [JURIST report] European human rights laws in shutting down four newspapers accused of publishing propaganda for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) [GlobalSecurity backgrounder] in a ruling also based on Article 10.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.