Note for European Court of Human Rights, 5 July 2016, 2017/2

Freedom of expression - This case concerns a Polish politician who made offensive statements agains a newspaper in a live television programme. The Polish courts then ordered him to issue a public apology and to pay a certain amount of money to a charity, because it turned out he could not prove his statements. The case before the ECtHR revolves around the distinction between facts and value judgments. Unlike other cases, the Court this time refuses to autonomously qualify the statements as either factual statements or value judgments.