Foreign trips of a humble official’s wife is a private secret, as court decided

Foreign trips of a humble official’s wife is a private secret, as court decided.  

On April 12, the judge of the Pavlodar City Court, Azhar Baimukhambetova, announced the decision on Asel Aidasheva’s lawsuit to journalist Jamila Maricheva.

The court partially satisfied the claim of the wife of the head of Pavlodar region physical culture and sports department and ordered to pay 200 thousand tenge as compensation for moral injury. Besides, the court ordered to compensate 50 thousand tenge of A. Aidasheva’s expenses for a representative ad litem, as well as pay a court fee of 1203 tenge. Thus, the court ordered the journalist to pay total amount of KZT251.203.

The judge explained her decision as follows: the plaintiff appealed to the court due to violation of two articles of the Civil Code - 144 (Right to privacy protection) and 145 (Right to own image). The court acknowledged that the journalist violated Asel Aidasheva's privacy secrets by two published articles. At the same time, the court declined the claim on the violation of the rights to personal image, because the plaintiff posted her photos on the social network herself and did not provide any evidence that access to her account was restrited.

As it was reported, in the end of February Asel Aidasheva's filed a lawsuit against the Pavlodar journalist Jamilya Maricheva on protection of the right to protect (as stated in the claim) personal data, right to her own image, the right to privacy and compensation of moral harm.

On February 1 and 8 the analytical Internet portal Ratel.kz published articles by journalist Jamilya Maricheva "How the wife of a sports official flew to Rome and Paris" and "How the wife of a sports official flew to Rome and Paris-2". The articles told about foreign trips of Asel Adasheva, the wife of the head of the department of physical culture and sports of Pavlodar region. The articles were based on numerous photographs the woman posted on her personal account in the social network Instagram. The account is publicly available and has more than a thousand subscribers. At the same time, Aidasheva's husband told ratel.kz that neither he nor his wife traveled abroad.

In the course of the trial, the plaintiff’s side insisted that the journalist violated the constitutional right for the protection of privacy since the photos were taken during the overseas vacations and therefore were private. At the same time, the plaintiff herself stated that she used her account to advertise her services as a stylist. In addition, Aydasheva assured that the access to her account was restricted and only her subscribers could visit it. At the time of publication of articles, the account had about 1300 subscribers. However, at the beginning of March, i.e., at the beginning of the trial, the number of subscribers exceeded 2500 that contradits the the plaintiff's words about the restricted access.

In her turn, journalist Maricheva said that all information concening the plaintiff’s life that she used in the articles, were at public access. In addition, the journalist pointed out that the evidence of alleged violation of privacy submitted to the court by the plaintiff were a low-quality printouts of screenshots with unreadable URLs.

The journalist refused to acknowledge the submitted printouts as her publications, explaining that the origin of such evidence was unclear and that the disputed articles were not presented to the court.