Finland's Supreme Court dismissed a case against a former newspaper editor and journalist of an Åland newspaper who stood accused of violating an individual's privacy in a news article.
In its dismissal of the case, the pair — who had worked for news outlet Nya Åland — were freed from paying a fine ordered by an appeal court.
The case stemmed from an article published online in 2016 about a police investigation of an Åland man. The article did not identify the man, but included a link to an article in Long Play, an investigative journalism outlet, that did publish his name.
The article said the man was suspected of the aggravated fraud of his wife, who was elderly and in diminished health.
Long Play's article dealt with suspicions about a man who ran a cinema in Turku. It included allegations of copyright infringement, among other things. The piece also noted that the man, who was in his 60s, was married to a woman over the age of 80 with a memory disorder who owned the cinema property.
A district court and an appeal court both sentenced the man to probation for an accounting offence and a copyright offence, related to the cinema's operation. In the original ruling, the district court drew attention to the fact that the man had been running the cinema on behalf of his elderly wife while taking advantage of her deteriorating health.
In its decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court noted that there was a societal interest in openly dealing with suspicions of people financially exploiting vulnerable people.
The court said that since the linked article was based on an interview with the suspect, the New Åland journalist and editor could safely assume that the article had been published with the man's consent.
Therefore, the court said it did not find that linking to a site that identified him was a breach of what could be considered acceptable.
The defendants were previously ordered by the Turku Court of Appeal in May 2020 to pay a fine, while the district court in Åland rejected the case in March 2018.