Information Note on the Court’s case-law 31

June 2001

Verliere v. Switzerland (dec.) - 41953/98

Decision 28.6.2001 [Section II]

Article 8

Article 8-1

Respect for private life

Surveillance of the applicant by private detectives engaged by her insurers following doubts about the genuineness of alleged after-effects of injuries: inadmissible

In 1979 the applicant sustained serious injuries in a road accident while travelling as a passenger in a vehicle covered by third-party insurance taken out with the S. insurance company. The insurance company met her medical costs until 1985, when it refused to provide any further cover. In 1989, having failed to negotiate an a greement, she brought an action for damages. In the course of the proceedings she discovered that the insurance company, which from 1982 onwards had had doubts as to whether the injuries were genuine, had instructed private detectives to ascertain her phys ical condition. She had therefore been under surveillance on various occasions, for example on a journey to the insurance company’s offices for an appointment and while on a picnic and her activities had been recorded in reports and photographs and on vide o. In 1990 the applicant requested the courts to protect her personality rights by prohibiting the surveillance operations, ordering the destruction of the photographs and film and declaring that the reports, pictures and film had constituted an unlawful i nvasion of her privacy. The trial and appeal courts both found against her. In December 1997 the Federal Court dismissed her application to have those courts’ decisions reversed. In 1993 she had lodged a criminal complaint against the private detectives an d the representatives of her insurance company, alleging, inter alia , that they had invaded her privacy. Consideration of the complaint was suspended pending the outcome of the action for damages; that action ended in March 2001 with an order for the insur ance company to pay damages to the applicant.

Inadmissible under Article 8: Swiss legislation afforded effective protection of individuals’ right to respect for their private lives in their relations with one another. Both criminal and civil remedies were available to anyone who considered that his personality rights had been infringed, and appropriate penalties could be imposed. In this case, the civil courts had carried out a thorough examination of the competing interests of the insurance company and the applicant. They had held that the insurance company had an overriding interest, since it had been under an obligation to check that the compensation claimed was justified as it was acting in the interests of all its insured, and since its investigations h ad been carried out in the public domain, had focused exclusively on the applicant’s mobility and had pursued the sole aim of preserving its own pecuniary rights. Accordingly, the Swiss courts had fulfilled the positive obligation inherent in ensuring effe ctive respect for privacy: manifestly ill-founded.

© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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