NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

and they had to be edited for the published version so as to conceal the identities of the cars and the participants. The editor-in-chief of the applicant company was served with a summons from a public prosecutor requiring the surrender of the photographs on the grounds of a criminal investigation. Following the refusal, he was detained and told that the company’s premises would be searched and its computers removed. Subsequently, the CD-ROM in question was surrendered after an order from the investigating judge, who had intervened at the company’s request and with the prosecutors’ agreement. This time, in its analysis the Court did not need to examine all three elements of the standard approach 909 to the interference. 910 Its analysis was able to stop on an assessment of the ‘quality of law’ requirement. It was observed that, under the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Netherlands, the power to order the disclosure had been entrusted to the public prosecutor, rather than to an independent judge. The Court came to the conclusion that the quality of the law in question had been deficient in the absence of a procedure attended by adequate legal safeguards enabling an independent assessment as to whether the interests of the criminal investigation overrode the public interest in the protection of journalistic sources. As a result, the interference had not been ‘prescribed by law’. 911 One more case concerning journalistic sources is Telegraaf Media Nederland Landelijke Media B. V. and Others v. the Netherlands. The applicant company in the instant case owned a newspaper. It published a number of articles, in which the newspaper alleged that information on pending investigations by the Netherlands secret services (‘AIVD’) into drugs and arms dealings had fallen into criminal hands. Following the publication, the company was ordered by the National Police Internal Investigation Department to surrender the documents in its possession. The company objected on the grounds that its source might be identifiable from fingerprints on the documents. The Court noted that the surrender order could not be justified solely by the need to identify the AIVD official(s) who had supplied the secret documents to the applicant. The public prosecutor had admitted that goal could have been achieved simply by studying the contents of the documents and identifying the officials who had had access to them. Accordingly, the government had not given ‘relevant and sufficient’ reasons for the surrender order and a violation of Article 10 in respect of the applicant company took place. Invocation of the protection of journalist sources may not serve as an escape from criminal liability. In the case of Stichting Ostade Blade v. the Netherlands, 912 the application was filed to the Court by Stichting Ostade Blade, a Dutch foundation possessing legal personality under Netherlands law. The complaint concerned the search of a magazine’s premises following a press release it issued announcing that it had received a letter from an organisation claiming responsibility for a series of bomb 909 KORFF, cited above. 910 Namely: 1) whether it pursued a “legitimate aim”; 2) whether it was “necessary in a democratic society”; and 3) whether it was based on (authorised or prescribed by) “law”. 911 VOORHOOF, D. Extra procedural safeguards for protection of journalistic sources: Sanoma Uitgevers B.V. v. the Netherlands . URL: accessed 1 March 2015. 912 Stichting Ostade Blade v. the Netherlands (dec.), no. 8406/06, 27 May 2014.

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