Marián Kočner – CJEU Judgment (European Union, 2024)

Following the murder of a Slovak journalist and his fiancée, Mr Ján Kuciak and Ms Martina Kušnírová, in Slovakia on 21 February 2018, the Slovak authorities (Národná kriminálna agentúra (National Crime Agency, Slovakia; ‘NAKA’)) conducted an extensive investigation. At the request of those authorities, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (‘Europol’) extracted the data stored on two mobile telephones allegedly belonging to Mr Marian Kočner, the data subject, who was prosecuted as an accomplice to that murder for having ordered the killings, following the investigation. Europol sent its scientific reports to those authorities and delivered to them a hard disk containing the encrypted data it had extracted. In one of its reports, Europol stated that Mr Kočner had been detained on suspicion of a financial offence since 2018 and that his name was, inter alia, directly linked to the ‘so-called mafia lists’ and the ‘Panama Papers’. In May 2019, the Slovak press and international network of investigative journalists published a large amount of information relating to Mr Kočner from his mobile telephones, including transcripts of intimate communications exchanged between him and his girlfriend. The conversation was carried by means of encrypted messaging service. For the reasons stated above, Mr Kočner sent a complaint to Europol seeking compensation in the amount of €100,000 as a reparation for the non-material damage on the bases of [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32016R0794 Article 50(1) Regulation 2016/794]. The sought compensation consisted of €50,000 for the unlawful disclosure of data subject's intimate conversation with his girlfriend and €50,000 for the inclusion of his name on the 'mafia list'. Europol and Slovak Republic contended that the arguments are unfounded as, firstly, Regulation 2016/794 (setting up the rules for the Europol) does not provide for such joint liability of Europol and the Member State.