Germany: Right to information for journalists about the financing of political blogs
by Ingo Beckendorf
A journalist can assert a right to information of the press against an incorporated company for general public services which are controlled by the public hand. That was decided by the first civil division of the German Federal Court, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), on 16 of March 2017 (judgment rn.: I ZR 13/16).
The claimant is a journalist. He wrote an article about the financing of the federal election campaign of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) in 2013 and earlier state elections of the SPD in North-Rhine Westphalia. In this context, the newsman investigated…
