Since Truman Capote wrote ‘In Cold Blood’, the story of the judicial processes went beyond the privacy limits. Currently, the audiovisual genre ‘true crime’ captures a millionaire audience.
The structure of these documentaries or stagings of real events is based on legal files that contain abundant confidential information about the victimswhat remains crudely exposed.
Some sentences, based on the public interesthave paved the way, such as that of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the ML and WW case (Germany 2021), which was based on another in which the plaintiffs had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1993 for the murder of a well-known actor.
After their conviction, the German radio station ‘Deutschlandradio’ issued a report in which it identified these people and transcribed their request to reopen the case, a document subject to procedural custody.
The condemned They also sued the weekly ‘Der Spiegel’ for having published information in which their full names were revealed and included photographs taken in the criminal court hearing room. Ultimately, the ECtHR rejected the claims and gave priority to the right to informationestablishing a jurisprudence that was not contested at the time, because they were convicted criminals.
Post mortem protection
“But, what about the suffering of the victims who also appear in the reports, and their personal rights?” asks media lawyer Christian Schertz, who denounces that “their rights fall by the wayside in ‘true crime’.”
«Your personal data is exploited to entertain the audience and generate ratings, without being able to be asked at all due to the frankly cynical circumstance that they have died,” he says, while calling for post-mortem protection of privacy.
Victims of sexual crimes, he insists, are especially worthy of protection, so the publication of data requires explicit consent, just as in the case of an attempted murder, but the rights of fatal victims expire after ten years in accordance with current German legislation. «In particular, the economic exploitation of these cases by media companies leads to urging the legislator to extend these deadlines», he advises.
Christian Solmecke, of the Cologne-based law firm Wilde Beuger Solmecke, specializing in Internet and information technologies, specifies that “the identity of the victim can only be revealed if it is relevant to the understanding of a crime.” public interest» and that «images of the victims cannot be published without consent». “True crime formats, unlike news, often report on cases that they happened a long time agoso public interest has diminished and identification of information is justified in fewer cases. Only if, for examplethe victim was prominent their identification can be justified even years later,” says Solmecke.
“Presenting pure facts is not enough to satisfy the concept of truth,” argues Alina Schober, who has researched the format at the University of Salzburg and concludes that it is necessary review the regulations from as many points of view as possible, including naturally that of the victims.
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