Kraków: A television drama that aired across several countries, and streamed everywhere at once, has produced a ruling that reaches well beyond the screen. On 18 June the Court of Justice of the European Union handed down its judgment in the Idziski case, clarifying which national courts may hear a claim when a person’s reputation is damaged by content broadcast in many member states and online simultaneously.
The dispute began in Poland. A former member of a clandestine Polish military unit active during the Second World War, together with a veterans’ association, sued the German co-producers of a series they said defamed the unit by depicting its soldiers as anti-Semitic and complicit in the Holocaust. The Polish Supreme Court, unsure of its own competence, asked Luxembourg whether Polish courts could award compensation for the full extent of the harm suffered from a broadcast that spread across borders on both television and the internet.
The question is more technical than it sounds, and it matters to anyone whose reputation crosses frontiers. Under the Union’s jurisdiction rules, a victim of an online tort has long been able to sue for all their damage in the member state where their ‘centre of interests’ lies, or to sue for local damage in each state where the content was accessible. Television, historically treated as a more territorially bounded medium, sat awkwardly against that internet-era doctrine. The Court’s answer was to collapse the distinction: given today’s technology, it reasoned, there are no longer meaningful differences between broadcast and online dissemination when the same content travels the same channels at the same time.
By extending its ‘centre of interests’ reasoning to cover a mixed television-and-internet broadcast, the Court lets a claimant concentrate a full-damages action in one forum rather than fragmenting it across every country where a programme was seen. That is a practical gift to individuals, who would otherwise face the daunting prospect of parallel suits, and a source of unease for broadcasters and producers, who now confront a wider map of possible courtrooms whenever a co-production airs across the continent.
Why it matters is the balance the judgment strikes between two rights the Union holds dear: the protection of personal dignity and reputation on one side, and freedom of expression and the free flow of audiovisual works on the other. Media lawyers will read the decision as tilting, at the margin, toward claimants, and will warn of a chilling effect on cross-border storytelling that touches sensitive history. Advocates for victims will counter that a person defamed in a dozen countries should not have to litigate in a dozen courts.
The ruling now returns to the Polish Supreme Court, which must apply it to the facts before it, and settles as precedent for national judges across the Union facing the next cross-border defamation claim. In an age when a single stream reaches every member state at once, the Court has drawn a clearer line under an old question about where, exactly, a reputation is injured.
