The Balance Between the Right to Privacy and the Publicity of the Hearing of Gag Orders
- Thus, two basic principles of the democratic regime stand on the scales and compete with each other, and guidelines for the balance between these basic principles have long been established in the Supreme Court's rulings. Thus, in the aforementioned case, the Supreme Court addressed the question of the publication of the name and details of the plaintiff, a lawyer by profession, in the framework of a compensation claim he filed due to a road accident in which he suffered bodily injury. The judgment set out the rules according to which the court will hear a gag order:
"The issue raised by this application for leave to appeal is the question of the proper balance, in the concrete case, between the principle of the publicity of the hearing and the right to privacy... In the tension between these two interests - the principle of the publicity of the hearing on the one hand and the right to privacy on the other - the point of balance in principle was determined by the legislature in section 70(d) of theCourts Law... The section states as follows:
"A court may prohibit any publication in connection with the court proceedings, if it deems it necessary to protect the safety of a litigant, witness or other person whose name was mentioned in the hearing or in order to prevent a serious violation of the privacy of one of them or to prevent an infringement of the privacy of a person with an intellectual disability or of a person with a mental disability, as defined in the Investigation and Testimony Procedures of Persons with Disabilities Law. of one of them."
Thus, according to the principle of balance set by the legislature, the principle of publicity of the hearing withdraws from the right to privacy only where the violation of this right is severe... The main criterion for examining the severity of the violation of the right to privacy is the nature of the information that one of the parties wishes to restrict. Thus, to the extent that this information relates to matters that belong to the core of the right to privacy, the court's tendency to recognize the violation as serious will increase.