Judges, lawyers, media regulators, data protection authorities, and journalists agreed to improve co-operation on privacy protection in Serbia’s digital media environment, following a two-day Council of Europe event focused on legal standards and practical responses to emerging privacy challenges.   

The first part of the event was organised as a capacity building session, focusing on personal data protection and the application of privacy standards in the media environment. Particular attention was devoted to the “right to be forgotten”, through the analysis of the Grand Chamber judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Hurbain v. Belgium (2023). Participants discussed the seven criteria developed by the Court for balancing freedom of expression and the right to respect for private life in digital press archives, including the nature of the archived information, the time elapsed since publication, the public interest in the information, the status of the person concerned, the consequences of continued online availability, the accessibility of the information in digital archives, and the impact of possible measures on freedom of expression.

The second part of the event took the form of an inter-institutional dialogue, concluded with an agreed public initiative to strengthen co-operation among relevant actors in order to improve the protection of privacy in the media. In this context, participants expressed readiness to contribute, within their respective mandates, to the timely exchange of information on cases presenting serious privacy risks, preventive and educational action, and further discussion of possible models of co-operation and communication in particularly sensitive cases.

The activities were conducted through the Action “Protecting freedom of expression and of the media in Serbia (PROFREX)”, implemented by the Division for Co-operation on Freedom of Expression, under the joint European Union and the Council of Europe programme “Horizontal Facility for the Western Balkans and Türkiye”.