MADRID 29 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
This Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) sentenced Hungary to financially compensate a Hungarian journalist for having violated her right to privacy and freedom of expression, years after she reported the illegal tapping of her phone while she was investigating. about the abuse of power.
The Hungarian State must pay within three months to the plaintiff, the journalist Klaudia Csikos, 6,500 euros for “moral damage” and 7,000 euros in costs and expenses of the judicial process, for having “violated articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, that is, “the right to respect for private life” and “the right to freedom of expression”, respectively.
This sentence comes years after Csikos filed several complaints against Hungary in May 2016, considering that he had been the subject of illegal wiretapping while working for the newspaper ‘Blikk’.
According to the lawsuit filed, his device was tapped without judicial permission in early November 2015 when he was conducting an investigation into abuse of power. The purpose of the Police was to identify one of the sources that the journalist had within the force.
The court estimates that the Hungarian authorities did not analyze “whether the interception of communications would involve confidential journalistic sources” or whether the judge who authorized the wiretapping ‘a posteriori’ “could have rejected such a measure to avoid revealing the sources,” it reads. in the sentence published on its website.
Likewise, it considers that Hungarian legislation lacks a series of elements to prevent abuses of power in criminal investigations, among them, “a definition of the categories of people susceptible to having their communications intercepted.”