In a decision of 26 September 2025, the Montenegrin Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information (“Agency”) determined that the publication of a court judgment against a public official, on a website run by a civic association, was in breach of the Montenegrin Data Protection Act.
Facts of the case
The Applicant is a member of the council of the local public broadcaster Radio Television Podgorica. Pursuant to the Prevention of Corruption Act, the Agency concluded that the Applicant holds the status of a public official.
On 9 March 2025, the non-governmental Media Center published on its website mediacentar.me the first page of a final judgment of the High Court in Podgorica concerning the Applicant, related to the criminal offence of document forgery. The publication included the Applicant’s photo.
Positions of the parties
The Applicant argued during the proceedings that Media Center obtained the judgment unlawfully and did not anonymise the text. The Applicant further maintained that Media Center had known or should have known that, after the issuance of the judgment by the High Court, the Applicant had been legally rehabilitated. (Rehabilitation, i.e. deletion from the criminal record, has the effect of cancelling the legal consequences of a criminal verdict and creating the legal fiction of non-conviction.)
Media Center stated that it had received the judgment anonymously and verified its authenticity through the court’s database. It explained that the published judgment identified the Applicant as a member of the Council of RTV Podgorica and, as such, a public official subject to a higher degree of public scrutiny. It emphasised that the information was relevant, given the Applicant’s public official status, and that there was a legitimate public interest in its publication. Media Center also referred to established case law of the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that while individuals may require special protection of their private life, this standard does not apply in the same way to public figures who are knowingly and inevitably exposed to public scrutiny. Finally, it noted that only the Applicant’s name and surname were disclosed, in line with the principle of proportionality in data processing.
Media Center also contended that it was unaware that the rehabilitation occurred after the issuance of the High Court’s judgment and argued that it was not required to verify whether the Applicant was listed in the criminal records or had requested deletion from such records.
Agency’s assessment
The Agency found the Applicant’s allegations well-founded. It determined that Media Center failed to prove that it obtained the judgment lawfully or that the judgment was publicly available. Media Center also failed to demonstrate proportionality of the processing.
The Agency found that Media Center’s explanation that it had obtained the judgment from an anonymous source indicated a lack of lawful basis for data collection. Only an anonymised version of the judgment was available on the court’s website. Hence, Media Center had not published the judgment in the form lawfully processed by the court but had unlawfully obtained and published it. The Agency referred to the violation of a provision in the Data Protection Act (Article 14) that requires any processing of personal data relating to criminal offences to be done by or under the supervision of a competent state authority.
Additionally, a decision of the Basic Court in Podgorica, submitted by the Applicant, confirmed that rehabilitation had taken place, thereby extinguishing the legal consequences of the conviction, including the right of third parties to publicly disclose data related to it.
The Agency found that Media Center provided no evidence of the Applicant’s consent or of the existence of an overriding public interest. The publication of the full, non-anonymised judgment therefore constituted a violation. Contrary to Media Centre’s reasoning, the Agency explained that Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees respect for private and family life, including protection from unauthorised processing of personal data. It emphasised that processing of personal data can only be considered lawful if it is prescribed by the law, necessary, and proportionate.
Comment
The Agency’s decision expresses the view that, even in the case of public officials, there are limits to how far media outlets can go when processing personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences. The decision of the Agency reinforces that, under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to privacy prevails over a person’s public official status and unfounded claims of the existence of public interest.
The reasoning in the decision is too condensed to allow for inferring complete guidance in potentially similar, but not identical, situations in the future. The Agency, in the specific instance, considered rehabilitation of the Applicant as a decisive factor in determining the unlawfulness of the data processing by the Media Center.
It seems that, even if the Applicant had not benefited from rehabilitation, the Agency would consider the publication of the judgment not to be in accordance with the Data Protection Act. The reason is the law’s provision requiring the processing of criminal data to be carried out only by or under the supervision of the competent state authority (Article 14 of the Data Protection Act). The Agency invoked that provision as a basis for concluding that the Media Center processed the personal data without a legal basis. This presumably means that the Agency considers that only a court or another “competent state authority” may publish, or order publishing, extracts from a court decision in a criminal case.
