4
MAGYAR JETI ZRT v. HUNGARY JUDGMENT
It also obliges the fifth defendant to delete the link to the first defendant’s statement
uploaded to youtube.com in its article ‘Football supporters heading to Romania
stopped to threaten Gypsy pupils’, published on 6 September 2013, within 15 days.
Defamation can be constituted not only by the stating of a falsehood but also by the
publication and dissemination of a falsehood that pertains to another person (see
Article 78 § 2 of the Civil Code). When establishing the occurrence of a violation, it
does not matter whether the persons concerned acted in good or bad faith, [but]
whether the violation can be imputable to them or not.
With regard to the foregoing, the Court has established that the second, fourth, fifth
[the applicant company], sixth and eighth defendants also violated the plaintiff’s
inherent right to be protected against defamation by publishing and publicly
disseminating the first defendant’s defamatory statement.
...
The objective sanctions for the violation of inherent rights:
Pursuant to paragraph 1 of Article 84 of the Civil Code, a person whose inherent
rights have been violated has the following options under civil law, depending on the
circumstances of the case:
(a) demand a court declaration of the occurrence of the violation;
(c) demand that the perpetrator make restitution in a statement or by some other
suitable means and, if necessary, that the perpetrator, at his own expense, make an
appropriate public disclosure by way of restitution;
(d) demand the termination of the injurious situation and the restoration of the
previous state of affairs by and at the expense of the perpetrator and, furthermore, to
have the effects of the violation nullified or deprived of their injurious nature.
The above-mentioned sanctions [Article 84 § 1 of the Civil Code] for the violation
of inherent rights are objective in nature, [and] therefore are independent from the
imputability of fault to the perpetrator or the lack thereof. The violation itself forms
the basis for the application of an adequate objective sanction. With regard to the
foregoing, the Court has established that the defendants violated the plaintiff’s
inherent rights, on the basis of paragraph 1 (a) of Article 84 of the Civil Code.
With regard to restitution in accordance with paragraph 1 (c) of Article 84 of the
Civil Code, the Court has ordered the defendants – with reference to the violation they
have caused through their actions – to make public on the websites concerned the first
and second paragraphs of the judgment that contain the establishment of the violation
and at the same time concern the plaintiff, and to declare the falseness of the statement
that was made publicly available, just as with the first defendant’s declaration that
contained untrue statements. Since the harm caused to the plaintiff can be repaired
within the framework of objective sanctions under the provision in question, the Court
has rejected the part of the plaintiff’s claim that referred to the public dissemination of
a declaration with a different content.
On the basis of paragraph 1 (d) of Article 84 of the Civil Code, the Court has
ordered the fifth defendant to deprive its related report of its injurious nature, but it
has rejected the same claim submitted by the plaintiff against the eighth defendant,
since it can be established from the facts of the case that the eighth defendant’s report
available on hvg.hu merely links to the report that appeared on the website 444.hu
maintained by the fifth defendant; therefore, depriving the latter of its injurious nature
effectively results in depriving the report on hvg.hu of its injurious nature.