The Council of Europe Guidelines on Safeguarding Privacy in the Media
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guidelines comprise a collection of standards of the Council of Europe (the Council/CoE) and the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) concerning the protection of privacy of public figures and private individuals in the media1. They also include data protection principles based on various regulatory instruments and best practices.
As regards the standards for balancing and mutually reinforcing the rights to private life and to freedom of expression, they are structured into five sections and first provide an overview of the right to freedom of expression, the role of the media and the notion of responsible journalism. They then elaborate the concept of private life and conditions for publishing private matters, providing specific examples of cases involving reporting on the private aspects of life. Lastly, the standards contain key standards on safeguarding privacy during crime reporting. There is an additional section on the importance of journalistic codes of ethics and other self-regulatory tools.
The guidelines target journalists2 and other media professionals and aim to help them with the practical application of the mentioned standards to the individual ethics-related dilemmas. For this reason, the details of legal tests and exercises of balancing rights are omitted.
References to Court cases are included in the last section of the guidelines for those interested in examining Court case law and Council soft law standards from a legal perspective.
The guidelines focus solely on the existing standards of the Council and the Court (except in the part addressing the data protection principles which also include national and EU standards and best practices); they neither introduce new standards nor have any legal force. They should be considered as an advice-giving tool. Given that they aim to be concise, brief and user-friendly, the guidelines focus only on the most crucial points of protecting privacy in the media. Journalists using them are encouraged to provide feedback and the guidelines are open for further updates and future improvements.
