A legal website automatically collected judgments published by the Directorate of Courts and published legal proceedings involving an individual over the years. The publications included identifying details such as: ID number, signature, and personal information regarding his medical condition, all from public proceedings.
The Court dismissed the demand of the person whose details were included in the verdicts to remove them from the website. The right to privacy grants a person control over the exposure of personal information about them, but the principle of open justice dictates that legal proceedings shall be visible to the public by default, and a ban on their publication is permitted only by virtue of law or an explicit judicial decision. Thus, the principle of open justice yields to the right to privacy only where the infringement of this right is severe. The main criterion for evaluating the intensity of the infringement on the right to privacy is the nature of the information that one of the parties seeks to restrict from publication. Even in the case of a severe infringement on privacy, the Court must balance the degree of privacy infringement against the extent of harm to the principle of open justice before exercising its authority to ban publication. In our case, although the publication of the judgment linked to the individual's name included medical information and significantly infringed upon his privacy, all of the website publications constitute a "fair and accurate report" of what occurred in proceedings held in open Court, without a publication ban in effect at the time of publication. Thus, there are publications protected under law.