The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of 22 November 2008 in the case Armonas/Armonienė against Lithaunia (application no. 36919/02), or on the difficult art of finding an adequate balance between freedom of expression and right to privacy

The Armonas/Armonienė judgment concerned the issue of balancing the two rights protected under the European Convention on Human Rights: freedom of expression (Art. 10) and right to privacy (Art. 8). The principal allegation raised by the applicants was the lack of adequate protection of their privacy due to the upper limit of pecuniary compensation allowed under the relevant national legislation. The European Court of Human Rights decided to analyse that allegation not as a mere privacy case but as a case touching upon the positive obligation of the Party State to build an adequate balance between freedom of the press and the protection of private life of an individual. As in any case that involves positive obligations of the State, the Respondent State enjoyed broad discretionary powers (called the margin of appreciation) and the Court should have limited its control to only verifying whether the interference in question has "in principle" violated the Convention. Actually, however, the Court’s control was deep and resulted in finding a violation of Art. 8. Another problem evidenced by the judgment is that of the consistency of the previous abundant case law on freedom of expression (Art. 10) and the newly emerging privacy case law (Art. 8).