The right to their own image of public figures in the Constitutional, Ordinary and European Case-Law. Evolution, concordances and divergences.

Abstract

Abstract:
This paper tackles the probably more controversial case concerning the dialectical relation between the freedoms of expression and information and the fundamental right to the own image. The one that refers to so-called «public figures». It does so from a dual perspective. On the one hand, it shows the evolution experienced in the right to their image of this type of people since Spanish Constitution, in 1978, recognized for the first time the right to own image as a fundamental right autonomous and different from the right to a private life (art. 18.1) to the present day. This is a process that has been marked by several landmarks: the adoption in 1982 of a rule (Organic Law 1/1982, of May 5, on civil protection of the right to reputation, privacy and own image) in
which the legislator lays down very specific guidelines as to how such conflicts should be resolved; the intensity with which this Law has conditioned the case law of judges and courts of ordinary jurisdiction, particularly the Supreme Court; and finally, the important role played by the case law of the Constitutional Court, which, regardless of the legislative requirements and taking constitutional categories as references, has finally established, in a process that we have differentiated in two stages, the public interest of the images (or, in other words, the contribution made by photos to a debate of general interest) in the decisive element to solve this type of conflicts. But on the other hand, special attention is also paid to the reciprocal relations that have been established over these decades among the case law of the Constitutional, Supreme and Strasbourg Courts. On this regard, we have found particularly interesting to look not only at the way in which the Constitutional Court has used the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (Article 10.2 Spanish Constitution) to establish its own doctrine on the fundamental right to their image of public figures, but also, especially, in the way in which this doctrine of the Constitutional Court has been followed or not by the Supreme Court and therefore if the latter has fulfilled its constitutional obligation (Article 5.1 Organic Law of the Judiciary).