European Court of Human Rights
7 September 2021
Facts
The applicant’s former husband accessed emails that she had exchanged on a dating site and produced them, without her consent, in the context, firstly, of proceedings that he had brought for shared parental responsibility and, secondly, divorce proceedings. The national court did not ultimately consider these emails.
Complaint
The applicant complained solely about the fact that the courts had not punished her husband for disclosing them relying on Article 8 of the Convention.
Court’s ruling
As the interference with the applicant’s private life had been caused by a private individual rather than by the State, her complaints fell to be examined from the perspective of the State’s positive obligations under Article 8. The Court noted that the husband’s act itself was punishable under criminal law. The applicant could participate actively in criminal proceedings.
National authorities found that the applicant had given her husband full access to her messaging account on the dating site and that these messages thus formed part of the couple’s private life. The Court considered that the national authorities’ reasoning about joint access to the spouses’ correspondence had been open to debate, especially since there were reasons in the present case to believe that the applicant’s consent to her husband’s access had been given in a situation of conflict. However, the conclusion reached by the domestic courts regarding the issue of access to those messages did not appear sufficiently arbitrary for the Court to substitute its own assessment for theirs.
The disclosure of the contested messages on the applicant’s private life had been limited. Those messages had been disclosed only in the civil proceedings, and public access to files in this kind of proceedings was restricted. In addition, the messages in question had not been examined in practice, as the family affairs court had ultimately not ruled on the merits of the husband’s requests.
In light of these considerations, the State had followed its positive obligation to protect the applicant’s rights to respect her private life and the confidentiality of her correspondence and thus no violation was found.