A human-rights court judgment on the liability of an internet news portal for offensive online comments will be made public next week.
The European Court of Human Rights will announce its decision in the case of Delfi AS v. Estonia (application no. 64569/09), at a public hearing on 16 June at 14.30 (CET).
The applicant, Delfi AS, is a public limited company registered in Estonia. It owns one of the largest internet news sites in the country.
In January 2006, Delfi published an article on its webpage about a ferry company. It discussed the company’s decision to change the route its ferries took to certain islands.
This had caused ice to break where ice roads could have been made in the near future. As a result, the opening of these roads – a cheaper and faster connection to the islands compared to the ferry services – was postponed for several weeks. Below the article, readers were able to access the comments of other users of the site.
Many readers had written highly offensive or threatening posts about the ferry operator and its owner.
At the request of the lawyers of the owner of the ferry company, Delfi removed the offensive comments about six weeks after their publication in March 2006.
The owner of the ferry company sued Delfi in April 2006, and successfully obtained a judgment against it in June 2008. The Estonian court found that the comments were defamatory, and that Delfi was responsible for them. The owner of the ferry company was awarded 5,000 kroons in damages (around €320).
An appeal by Delfi was dismissed by Estonia’s Supreme Court in June 2009.
In particular, the Supreme Court rejected the portal’s argument that, under EU Directive 2000/31/EC on Electronic Commerce, its role as an information society service provider or storage host was merely technical, passive and neutral, finding that the portal exercised control over the publication of comments.
Relying on Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights, Delfi complains that the Estonian civil courts found it liable for comments written by its readers.
