General News

In the context of reporting on homicides, topics are often touched upon that affect the highly personal sphere of life of a crime suspect. In these cases, it is the task of the media courts to decide whether a highly personal matter actually exists in the sense that "its disclosure by outsiders affects personal integrity to a particular degree".

The Vienna Higher Regional Court (OLG) had to make this assessment with regard to publications on a criminal offence placed in various media (print, video, still images). A woman was killed in her own flat with a shot to the head and the applicant in the media proceedings was associated with the acts as the ex-partner of the person killed. In its decisions, the Vienna Higher Regional Court dealt with the individual publications in a very differentiated manner with regard to a possible violation of the most personal sphere of life. In the course of the repeated and detailed reporting on this crime, the "arrest video" of the suspect was also published, among other things. It shows "how the fully drunk and unconscious applicant falls unbraked from a park bench onto the asphalt".

The video shows the fully drunk and unconscious applicant falling unbraked from a park bench onto the asphalt, where he remains motionless for several minutes next to a pool of blood, and whose vital signs are then checked by the WEGA officers who intervene". The Vienna Higher Regional Court saw in this "a regular display of the complete collapse of the applicant which goes beyond the mere arrest, because the compromising portrayal of his person in an absolute extreme situation despite a previous capital crime falls under his highly personal sphere of life and the type of portrayal only serves to satisfy the sensationalism of the public and not its interest in information". In contrast to this blatant publication of the video, the print reporting on the alcohol/addiction illness of the crime suspect and his alcohol intoxication after the crime was not considered unlawful. The "reports formulated with restraint on this point" were permissible because

both his alcohol/addiction disease and his alcohol intoxication were directly related to the specific felony. The comments of the Vienna Higher Regional Court show that the highly personal sphere of life must also be respected in crime reporting, but that publications can be permissible with regard to the crime suspects if they are factual and serve the public's interest in information.