In the constitutional complaint of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) against the judgement of the Higher Court in Ljubljana, which concerns the decision on the claim for a public apology and the accessory decision on costs, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia has annulled the judgement and remanded it to the Higher Court.
It is a suit of SDS against the Delo newspaper company because of a controversial and insulting article by the journalist Dejan Karba with the title: ‘Denar iz Patrie ni končal pri Janezu Janši, temveč v njegovi stranki SDS’ (The money from Patria did not end up with Janez Janša but with his SDS party) A year ago, the Higher Court already acknowledged the right of SDS to compensation in the same case.
According to the complainant, the article already misrepresents facts in its title since it attributes unlawful conduct – the receipt of bribes – without leaving any room for doubt, and at the same time the only source of the article, the investigator Kaj Erik Bjِrqvist, denies having said what the article claims. The Higher Court already found that the title of the article does not make a conclusion about the inadmissibility of the content possible, and that the writing conveys a distorted content that differs from what the Finnish investigator said to the journalist, i.e. that the money from the Patria case ended up in SDS, since the former could not confirm that there is enough evidence for such a conclusion. For these reasons, the complainants judged that their rights from five different articles of the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia had been violated.