European Court of Human Rights : Standard Verlagsgesellschaft mbH v. Austria (no. 3),

While the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) over the past years has dealt with many aspects of the right to freedom of expression in the digital environment, it only recently delivered a judgment specifically focussing on the right of anonymity for user generated content on news portals. In Standard Verlagsgesellschaft mbH v. Austria (no. 3) the applicant media company complained that court orders imposing an obligation to disclose data revealing the identity of users who had posted comments on its Internet news portal had infringed its freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The ECtHR found a breach of Article 10 ECHR because the Austrian courts had not sufficiently considered the users’ right of anonymity and the interest of the media company to protect the users as the authors of the comments, while the comments on the Internet news platform were part of a political debate, without being hate speech or otherwise clearly unlawful