Articolul 10 din Convenție. Dreptul de a primi și transmite informații deținute de autoritățile judiciare. Refuzul instanțelor naționale de a permite reclamanților accesul la un dosar penal soluționat
Article 10 of the Convention. The right to receive and transmit information held by the judicial authorities. The refusal of the national courts to allow the applicants the access to a solved criminal file

Summary/Abstract: Article 10 of the Convention does not grant individuals an absolute right of access to the information held by public authorities. In order to determine whether this article is applicable to a public authority's refusal to communicate information, the situation must be evaluated in the light of the criteria set by E.C.H.R in the Magyar Helsinki Bizottság v. Hungary [GC] case, respectively: (a) the purpose of the request for information; (b) the nature of the information requested; (c) the special role of the information seeker, to "receive and transmit" to the public; and (d) the information is already prepared and available. In relation to the particular circumstances of the case, the Court observed that the access of a nongovernmental organization that carried out journalistic investigation activities in matters of public interest and of a journalist within this organization to the documents of a criminal file in the court archive, by fully photographing the file, was not essential for the effective exercise of freedom of expression. The purpose of conducting the investigative activities was reached, and the result of the journalistic investigation was made public. Basically, the applicants sought to establish the absolute character of the right to obtain access to the information held by the state. As regards the third applicant, the Court established that he did not present to the competent national jurisdictions the reasons for which the requested information was required (the complete transmission of the copies of the preventive arrest orders concerning the high officials accused of corruption offenses, whose criminal cases they were in the role of judicial authorities). As this complainant was neither a journalist nor a "watchdog" who should inform the public, the Court considered that the third criterion of Magyar Helsinki Bizottság v. Hungary case is not met, in terms of the special role of the information seeker. The applicant's access to this information was not decisive for the effective exercise of his right to the freedom of expression. The court was not convinced that the information in question met the criterion of public interest, as defined in Magyar Helsinki Bizottság. Emphasizing the importance of access, in any form, of the public to judicial decisions, the Court stated that the criterion of public interest for the disclosure of information within the meaning of art. 10 of the Convention must be analyzed in relation to the specific object of the documents in question. The applicant limited himself to pointing out that the requested court orders targeted known public persons. This reason was not, in itself, sufficient to justify the full disclosure, to a third party acting in the private interest, of the court orders that interested certain ongoing criminal investigations, especially those parts of those ordinances that did not contain public information, according to the national law.

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