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The earliest interpretation by the Strasbourg court of reputation as a dimension of the right to privacy within Article 8 ECHR dates back to 2004. There, the applicant (a radio station), brought a case to the Strasbourg Court which argued that the French courts had breached articles 6, 7 and 10 ECHR when ruling against the applicant in defamation proceedings. These

268 _{Securitate was the Ceausescu's secret police during the communist regime in Romania.}

269 _{[2009] ECHR 2252 cited in O’Callaghan, ibid. 76; In Dorota Kania v. Poland Application no. 44436/13) [ECHR,}

2016] [73], The Court applied the same approach in treating the reputation interest when the Court reiterates that the right to protection of reputation is a right which is protected by Article 8 of the Convention as part of the right to respect for private life…..In order for Article 8 to come into play, however, an attack on a person’s reputation must attain a certain level of seriousness and be carried out in a manner causing prejudice to personal enjoyment of the right to respect for private life. The Court takes note that the accusation was serious for Mr A.C. To call somebody a secret collaborator with the communist-era security services carries a negative assessment of his behaviour in the past and is surely an attack on his good name’.

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concerned allegations made by the station about M Junot, a former deputy mayor of Paris, who had supervised the deportation of Jews in 1942. 271 _{The European Court upheld the}

French domestic decision, also stating that: 'The Court would observe that the right to protection of one's reputation is, of course, one of the rights guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention, as one element of the right to respect for private life’. 272 _{In Lindon and Others v} France, 273 _{Mr L. Loucaides strongly reaffirmed this interpretation of the relationship between}

reputation and private life right.

‘The right to reputation should always were considered as safeguarded by Article 8 of the Convention, as part and parcel of the right to respect for one's private life’

In Pfeifer v Austria, 274 _{the link between reputation and private life was predicated}

upon the implications of reputational harm for both the personal identity and the individual's physical and psychological integrity. Each of these constitutes aspects of private life, the right to which is guaranteed by Article 8 ECHR. In this case, the European Court found that the allegations in question, namely that the applicant was part of a hunting society and that the applicant's criticism of P.'s article had driven P. to commit suicide, were defamatory and justified the invocation of Article 8 ECHR rights since:

The Court considers that a person's reputation, even if that person is criticized in the context of public debate, forms part of his or her personal identity and

271 _{Radio France & Ors v France (2005) 40 EHRR 706: Chauvy & Ors v France (2005) 41 EHRR 29.} 272 _{Radio France, ibid. 25.}

273 _{(2008) 46 EHRR 35, [2007] ECHR 836} 274 _{(2007) Application No. 12556/03.}

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psychological integrity and therefore also falls within the scope of his or her "private life"' 275

Despite Mr. Loucaides’s disagreement with the finding of defamation concerning the allegations in question, his justice thoroughly supported the interpretation of the scope of private life to include an individual’s reputational interest. The court, however, did not provide further explanations regarding the link between reputational harms and dignity, as well as between dignity and those rights to personal identity, physical and psychological integrity, which constitute ‘private life’. 276 _{This stemmed, perhaps, from the judicial}

willingness to treat reputation as a direct and automatic aspect of a person’s private life, ergo there being no need to identify the link between these two notions. 277 _{Nonetheless, in}

subsequent cases, the Strasbourg Court denied any automatic inclusion of reputation within the protective ambit of Article 8 ECHR when it introduced and upheld a new threshold of the seriousness of reputational harm in order to engage the right of private life. This threshold was firstly applied in A v. Norway ,278 _{there, the European Court ruled that the reputational}

harm must be serious and cause damage to the individual enjoyment of the right to private life, namely it must be sufficiently grave for it to legitimately fall within the ambit of private life. The Court upheld the application and found that the publication’s identification of the applicant as a murder suspect was seriously harmful to the applicant’s reputation and ‘entailed a particularly grievous prejudice to the applicant’s honour and reputation that was especially harmful to his moral and psychological integrity and to his private life’. 279

Furthermore, the court found the national court failed to accord a proportionate or proper

275 _Ibid.

276 _{Aplin & Bosland, (n 6) 275} 277 _{Iibd. 275-6.}

278 _{Application no. 28070/06 (ECHR 2009).} 279 _{Ibid. [73].}

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weight to the applicant’s Article 8 ECHR. 280 _{In Karako v. Hungary, the European Court offered}

clear guidance on the relationship between reputation and privacy since the Court identified how reputational harms could fall within the protective scope of private life rights. 281 _The

Court distinguished in this case between personal integrity falling within the ambit of private life and the notion of external evaluation falling within the individual’s reputation as it related to financial interests and social status. Thus, reputational harms which only affect the external evaluations of the individual, namely her esteem as upheld by society, and do not undermine the individual’s personal integrity are thereby excluded from the protective scope of private life. 282 _{The Court also reiterated that the serious nature of the allegations in question}

constituted the decisive factor when determining whether the individual's personal integrity was indeed undermined for the purposes of engaging Article 8 ECHR. 283

Reputation claims may fall within the framework of Article 8 ECHR if the statements complained of were seriously offensive that damage an individual’s personal integrity, whereas reputational claimsrelated primarily to financial interests or social status fall within the framework of Article 10 ECHR. 284 _{However, in a practical sense, nothing in Karako's}

decision explains how serious allegations could affect personal integrity in a manner justifying the inclusion of reputation within the ambit of private life. 285 _{It is on these grounds that Judge}

Jociene articulated his view that the question of that relationship between reputation and private life had not been clearly answered within the Strasbourg Jurisprudence. Jociene thus

280 _{Ibid. at 74-5.} 281 _{(n 258) at 22.} 282 _{Ibid. at 23.} 283 _Ibid.

284 _{Brid Jordan, ‘Reputation and Article 8: Karako v Hungary’ Case Comment (2010) Entertainment Law Review.} 285 _{Aplin & Bosland, (n 6) 278.}

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asserted that this matter should be the subject of careful future consideration and ought to be left open for the time being. 286

The Grand Chamber had the opportunity to clarify its jurisprudence regarding the relationship between reputation and private life notion in Axel Springer AG v. Germany. 287

The applicant, in this case, was 'Der Bild, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, in respect of two articles published about the star of the well-known police television series who was arrested and then convicted of possessing a small quantity of drugs (cocaine). The domestic Courts granted the actor a permanent injunction prohibiting the applicant from engaging in any further publications upon the ground that such publication constituted a serious and unjustified interference with the actor’s right of personality. The Court upheld the application and considered the interference with the applicant’s freedom of expression as unjustifiable within a democratic society; consequently, the applicant’s article 10 ECHR was held to be unjustifiably violated. 288 _{The Court reaffirmed the seriousness threshold applied in A v.} Norway to accommodate reputation within the ambit of private life as protected under Article 8 ECHR.

Whilst adopting the expanded definition of the private life concept, 289 _{the court also}

added a new qualification to explicitly exclude those reputational harms foreseeably resulting from the applicant’s own actions: ‘The Court held, moreover, that Article 8 cannot be relied on in order to complain of a loss of reputation which is the foreseeable consequence of one’s

286 _{Karako v. Hungary, ibid. Opinion of Judge Jociene [7].} 287 _{(n 5) [18-23].}

288 _{Ibid. at 110-111.}

289 _{The concept of "private life" is a broad term not susceptible to the exhaustive definition, which covers the}

physical and psychological integrity of a person and can, therefore, embrace multiple aspects of a person's identity, such as gender identification and sexual orientation, name or elements relating to a person's right to their image. It covers personal information that individuals can legitimately expect should not be published without their consent. Ibid. at 83.

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own actions such as, for example, the commission of a criminal offence’. 290 _{Additionally, the}

European Court’s recent decision in Magyar Jeti Zrt v. Hungary added a new qualification codifying reputation within the remit of private life. 291 _{Professional reputation had hitherto}

been excluded from the ambit of private life, despite the clear potential seriousness of reputational harms, since it was foreseeable and legitimate that public figures such as politicians would receive further criticism and close scrutiny than private individuals.

Overall, despite the blurred boundaries between the notions of reputation and private life, the European Court adopted a progressive approach to accommodating reputation interest within this area. Their ruling accommodated reputational interests within the protective scope of private life where reputational harms measurably affect the enjoyment of the right to this private life. As previously elucidated, detrimental impacts upon the individual's personal identity and her physical and psychological integrity caused by reputation harms also clearly come under the same category of violations against 'private life'.