European Court of Human Rights

Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 153

June 2012

Tatár and Fáber v. Hungary - 26005/08

Article 10

Article 10-1

Freedom of expression

Convictions for illegal assembly for hanging dirty laundry outside Parliament building: violation

 

Facts – The applicants were prosecuted and fined for illegal assembly after staging a political protest which involved hanging laundry – symbolising “the nation’s dirty laundry” – on a fence surrounding the Parliament building in Budapest. The protest, which lasted just 13 minutes, was attended by a small number of journalists who had learnt of the event from the applicants’ website and turned up to ask questions. In finding the applicants guilty of the offence, the domestic courts ruled that the protest had amounted to an “organised event” under section 6 of the Assembly Act, not a cultural event, and that the authorities should therefore have been given the statutory three days’ prior notice.

Law – Article 10: The impugned event, which had involved only two people and lasted a very short time, constituted predominantly an expression and thus fell within the scope of Article 10. The imposition of a fine had interfered with the applicants’ right to freedom of expression and pursued the legitimate aims of ensuring public safety, protecting the rights of others and preventing disorder.

It was not, however, necessary to consider whether the interference was prescribed by law as, in any event, it had not been necessary in a democratic society. The applicants’ protest could not be considered tantamount to an assembly. The mere fact that an “expression” occurred in public did not necessarily turn the event into an assembly. Like “association”, “assembly” had an autonomous meaning for Convention purposes, with the classification in national law being no more than a starting-point. An “assembly” constituted a specific form of communication of ideas in which the gathering of an indeterminate number of persons with the identifiable intention of being part of the communicative process could in itself be an intensive expression of an idea. In such cases, support for the idea is expressed through the very presence of a group of people, particularly in a place accessible to the general public. An assembly could also serve the exchange of ideas between speakers and participants. In the applicants’ case, these constitutive elements of an “assembly” had been absent. Even though the event had been advertised on the Internet, there had been no intention to recruit participants other than a few journalists. The aim of the “political performance” had been to send out a message through the media rather to encourage the direct gathering of protestors (which in any event would have been virtually impossible to achieve in 13 minutes).

By qualifying the expressive interaction of the two applicants as an assembly, the authorities had brought the Assembly Act into play with the attendant obligation to notify the authorities of the event. While notification might be justified in certain cases to enable the authorities effectively to coordinate and facilitate the holding of an assembly, there had been no such need in the instant case, as there was nothing to indicate that either public order or the rights of others were affected. The national authorities’ approach to the concept of assembly did not correspond to the rationale of the notification rule and the application of that rule to an “expression” – rather than only to “assemblies” – was liable to create a prior restraint that was incompatible with the free communication of ideas.

The authorities had, therefore, not given “relevant and sufficient” reasons for the interference with the applicants’ freedom of expression.

Conclusion: violation (unanimously).

Article 41: EUR 1,500 each in respect of non-pecuniary damage.

 

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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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