Data protection, anonymity and courts
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Author | Michal Bobek |
| DOI | 10.1177/1023263X19851628 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Editorial
Data protection, anonymity
and courts
Michal Bobek
A few months ago, I participated in a conference at the Luxembourg Max Planck Institute for
Procedural Law. The topic was ‘Open Justice’. One contribution caught my attention in particular:
that of Jean-Claude Wiwinius, the president of the Luxembourgish Supreme Court. Pondering on
access and transparency in civil proceedings, he warned against the ‘over-anonymization’ of
judicial decisions. He suggested that the right balance must be str uck between the protection
of personal data, on the one hand, and the publication of judgments, on the other. With a pinch
of something that, if read between the lines, might be perceived as jealousy, he mentions having
recently participated in the opening of the judicial year at the European Court of Human Rights
(ECtHR) where President Raimondi (of the ECtHR) and President Lenaerts (of the Court of Justice
of the European Union) were quoting the key judgments from their respective jurisdictions by the
name of the parties. He points out the ease with which international courts might quickly quote
their judgments in this way.
I know that feeling. Coming from the Cze ch judicial system, which shares the Germanic/
Austrian heritage of judicial anonymity, we felt similar jealousy in early 2000, when deciding
how to (re)structure the way judgments would be published, and looked at the practice of both
European courts, as well as a number of national systems. In the past, Czech tradition has dictated
that all names be anonymized. In the title (header) of the judgment, for the purposes of publication
in court reports,
1
a person was anonymized by the adoption of her initials. In the text of the
judgment, the persons participating in the judicial proceedings were also anonymized, or prefer-
ably referred to by the ‘generic function’ they had within those proceedings: the applicant, the
respondent, the accused, the joint party, and so on, without actually using their real names.
This particular style has a long history: it can be found in the court reports from the Czecho-
slovak interwar period (1918 to 1938), but also, for example, in Austria.
2
In the Communist period,
judicial ‘anonymity’ adopted – for rather obvious reasons – new and rather surprising dimensions:
not only were the names of parties and other persons participating in the proceedings anonymized –
including legal persons – but some zealous anonymizers would also anonymize the names of
1. Naturally only after a full judgment, containing all the information, would be signed by the judge or chamber in question,
publicly pronounced, and served on the parties.
2. Thanks to Alex (O
¨sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, ‘Historische Rechts- und Gesetzestexte Online’, http://alex.onb.ac.
at), a collection of the Austrian National Library, the court reports of the Imperial Court (Reichsgericht) between 1869–
1918, as well as those of the Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgerichtshof) between 1876–1934 can be viewed online.
Maastricht Journal of European and
Comparative Law
2019, Vol. 26(2) 183–189
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1023263X19851628
maastrichtjournal.sagepub.com
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