PARTLY DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE JÄDERBLOM

1. While I agree with the finding that the applicant’s rights under Article 10 were violated in the present case, I take a different view as regards the alleged violation of Article 8.

2. The interests that are deemed to fall within the scope of the protection of the right to respect for private life under Article 8 have broadened in the Court’s case-law, particularly where potential victims of a violation are concerned. The Court’s case-law, which originally seemed to offer protection only to natural persons, now recognises the right of legal persons to the protection of their “home” and “correspondence”.

This development started with applications lodged by natural persons concerning interferences at their workplaces or otherwise connected with their professional lives (see, among other authorities, Buck v. Germany , no. 41604-98, ECHR 2005-IV, and Niemietz v. Germany , 16 December 1992, Series A no. 251-B). The Court has expanded its interpretation of the concept of “home” to include professional or business activities or premises (see Niemietz , cited above, §§ 30-31). In these cases the bearer of the rights under Article 8 were still natural persons. In the case of Société Colas Est and Others v. France (no. 37971/97, ECHR 2002-III), however, the Court, referring to the nature of the Convention as a “living instrument which must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions” and pointing out that the Court had already recognised a company’s right under Article 41 to compensation for non-pecuniary damage sustained as a result of a violation of Article 6 § 1 of the Convention, ruled that “the time has come to hold that in certain circumstances the right guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention must be construed as including the right to respect for a company’s registered office, branches or other business premises” (§ 41). The Court reached this conclusion after having, inter alia , cited the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Communities (CJEC). In Hoechst v. Commission (judgment of 21 September 1989 in joined cases 46/87 and 227/88), the CJEC had concluded that, regardless of the non-applicability of Article 8, the need for protection in the sphere of the private activities of any person, whether natural or legal, must be recognised as a general principle of Community law.

In the same body of case-law the Court has stated that the entitlement to interfere to the extent permitted by paragraph 2 of Article 8 might well be more far-reaching where professional or business activities or premises were involved than would otherwise be the case (see Niemietz , cited above, § 31, and, mutatis mutandis , Société Colas Est and Others , cited above, § 49).

3. In the present case, the search warrant was worded broadly enough to encompass all kinds of material relating to certain suspected crimes. However, the real aim of the investigation was to identify a suspected journalist and secure evidence against him in connection with investigations into certain specific crimes. The search took place in the presence of the journalist in question, who cooperated with the police officers throughout. It does not appear that the investigation and the search targeted the applicant company as such or the editor of the newspaper.

The Court’s standpoint is that entitlement to interfere might be more far-reaching in the case of business activities and premises. The circumstances in which the Court has found a violation in this regard (in Société Colas Est and Others , which dealt with large-scale seizures by State inspectors of several thousand documents in the applicant company’s head office and various subsidiary branches, without prior authorisation by any judicial authority) lead me to conclude that in the present case the disturbance of the applicant company’s “home”, which consisted in entering the company’s premises and questioning the journalist, cannot be regarded as tantamount to an interference with its right to respect for “private life”. As regards the removal of the journalist’s papers and the measure, which was remarkable in itself, of inserting a USB memory stick into his computer, the measures also targeted the journalist as a suspect, and the applicant company has not claimed that they directly affected it in any other way. In my view, moreover, these measures were not such as to qualify as interference with the applicant’s right to respect for its private life. For these reasons, I consider that the application is manifestly ill-founded as regards the complaint under Article 8 and should have been declared inadmissible as regards that part.