Should a news outlet revise an old article if you are later acquitted?

No, not under Belgian law as it currently stands. On September 30, 2026, the presiding judge of the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels ruled that no legal provision requires a news outlet to update old articles to reflect a subsequent acquittal, and that the right of reply under the law of June 23, 1961, does not apply in this context either. Anyone who nevertheless seeks to compel such an update through the courts risks a conviction themselves under the anti-SLAPP law of May 30, 2026. In the case against the RTBF, the attempt cost the plaintiffs 2,500 euros in damages, an increased court fee of 3,000 euros, and the filing fee.

In short:

• On September 30, 2026, the presiding judge of the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels dismissed, in summary proceedings, the claim filed by a nonprofit organization and its director seeking to have a mention of their acquittal on September 12, 2025, included in three RTBFarticles from 2020.
• The claim was dismissed on the grounds of lack of urgency: the articles dated back more than five years before the proceedings, they did not concern the criminal prosecution, and the Act of June 23, 1961, provided for a separate proceeding on the merits.
• The judge applied the criteria of the new anti-SLAPP law for the first time to a lawsuit filed against a media outlet and ordered the plaintiffs to pay 2,500 euros in damages and 3,000 euros in litigation costs.

The facts

In the spring and summer of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, RTBF published three articles on its website about rapid tests. The first, dated April 10, 2020, examined the reliability of self-tests sold online to private individuals. The second, dated August 12, 2020, reported that the police in Mons had shut down a testing session organized by a family doctor through the nonprofit United People. The third, dated August 21, 2020, reported that a citizens’ group had filed a complaint against that doctor with the Belgian Medical Association. That last article also named a board member of the nonprofit organization.

The nonprofit organization and its director were subject to searches on October 2, 2020; were referred by the preliminary hearing chamber to the criminal court on April 3, 2024; and were acquitted by the criminal court in Mons on September 12, 2025. The court found that the tests they sold were intended to be administered by a healthcare provider and therefore did not fall under the royal decree prohibiting self-tests.

A few days later, on September 18 and 22, 2025, they sent an email to RTBF requesting a “right of reply”: a mention of the acquittal in the three articles. RTBF refused. Complaints were filed with the Journalistic Ethics Council were dismissed as inadmissible. On October 23, 2025, the plaintiffs filed a petition with the judge in preliminary relief proceedings in Bergen, who, on April 3, 2026, declared that he lacked territorial jurisdiction and referred the case to Brussels.

Their final claim was as follows: to order the RTBF, within 48 hours of service of the complaint, to post an update beneath each of the three articles, stating the date of the ruling and the text of the acquittal, subject to a penalty of 2,000 euros per day and per article. Their original complaint went considerably further: in it, they sought more than 7,770,000 euros in damages, based on losses they themselves estimated at between 400 and 800 million euros. For its part, RTBF filed a counterclaim seeking a declaration that the proceedings constituted a SLAPP lawsuit, along with 2,500 euros in damages per plaintiff and increased litigation costs.

The ruling

The Jurisdiction of the Judge in Interlocutory Proceedings and the Lack of Urgency

The RTBF argued that the presiding judge lacked jurisdiction in the summary proceedings because the act of June 23, 1961 on the right of reply prescribes a claim “as in summary proceedings,” in which the presiding judge rules on the merits. The presiding judge rejected that defense: the case had been brought pursuant to Article 584 of the Judicial Code, and he has jurisdiction over that claim. The review is then conducted according to the criteria for ordinary summary proceedings, with urgency being the primary consideration.

Urgency is the condition under which the fear of damage of a certain magnitude, or of serious inconvenience, makes an immediate decision desirable. The Court of Cassation defined the concept as follows in its ruling of September 13, 1990 (Supreme Court, September 13, 1990, 8533). Anyone who invokes urgency in their initial pleading confers jurisdiction on the judge in summary proceedings; if that judge subsequently determines that there is no urgency, he or she shall declare the claim unfounded (Supreme Court. April 10, 2003, C.02.0229.F). The presiding judge also reiterated the three traditional grounds for dismissal: those who have waited too long, those who have caused the urgency themselves, and those who can achieve the same result in a timely manner through the proceedings on the merits will not receive a ruling in summary proceedings.

The claim stalled on those three points. The articles were published in April and August 2020—more than five years before the petition was filed. According to the presiding judge, the plaintiffs failed to explain why the acquittal of September 12, 2025, had concretely altered their situation, or why the absence of any mention of that acquittal would exacerbate their harm today. Furthermore, the three articles did not concern the criminal prosecution: they reported on rapid tests, a suspended testing session, and a complaint filed with the Medical Board. According to the presiding judge, the connection between the publications and the subsequent acquittal was not sufficiently direct. Nor had the articles become inaccurate; they faithfully reflected the facts as they stood at the time of publication. Finally, the presiding judge referred to Article 12 of the Act of June 23, 1961: anyone whose right of reply has been denied may, within fifteen days, appeal to the presiding judge of the court of first instance, who will then rule on the merits of the case as the court of last resort. That avenue was open and sufficient.

The claim was therefore dismissed for lack of urgency. The presiding judge explicitly added the following, noting that it was superfluous.

The Right of Reply under the Act of June 23, 1961

The chairperson also assessed the request against the conditions of the right of reply itself. Article 8 of the Act of June 23, 1961, requires—on pain of inadmissibility—a registered letter to be sent no later than the thirtieth day after the broadcast, program, or publication, and a response text of no more than three minutes’ reading time or 4,500 characters. The plaintiffs sent emails in September 2025 regarding articles from 2020. According to the chair, they had therefore forfeited their right of reply.

Added to this was Article 9 of the same law. A response may be refused if it is not directly related to the contested words or images, or if it goes beyond what is necessary to correct inaccurate facts. The requested text concerned the acquittal, whereas the articles made no mention of the criminal prosecution. According to the chairperson, there was no direct connection—not even an indirect one. In his view, the mere fact that someone is mentioned in an article does not, in and of itself, confer a right of reply regarding any subsequent topic.

The broadcaster’s non-contractual fault in refusing to update the information

The plaintiffs also based their claim on Article 6.5 of the Civil Code: The RTBF erred by failing to update its articles. The chairperson saw no legal basis for this. No one has a subjective right to demand that a media outlet publish or disseminate specific information. Freedom of speech protects not only the right to publish, but also an editorial team’s freedom to choose what it publishes. Barring a specific legal obligation, such as the right of reply, a judge cannot compel a media outlet to publish certain content or cover a specific topic.

According to the chairperson, no provision requires a media outlet to systematically update its publications to reflect every subsequent development in the situation of the individuals mentioned. Such an obligation would constitute an interference with the RTBF’s editorial freedom, which it considered to be protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

RTBF's counterclaim under the anti-SLAPP law

RTBF called the Act of May 30, 2026 in, which the Directive (EU) 2024/1069 on strategic lawsuits against public participation. A SLAPP, in the words of the new Article 1385/1 of the Judicial Code, is a proceeding that is not initiated to actually assert a right, but whose primary purpose is to prevent, restrict, or punish public debate through claims that are wholly or partially unfounded.

The chairperson first clarified a misunderstanding. RTBF sought 2,500 euros pursuant to the amended Article 780bis of the Judicial Code, which raises the fine for abuse of procedural rights against public debate to 25,000 euros. However, that fine goes to the State, not to the opposing party; it is separate from the damages awarded for vexatious and reckless litigation.

The chair then went through the criteria set forth in the new Article 1385/5: the disproportionate nature of the claim and the excessive value of the dispute, the existence of multiple proceedings concerning similar matters, intimidation before or during the proceedings, abuse of an imbalance of power, and procedural tactics in bad faith. He noted that the plaintiffs had initially sought more than 7,770,000 euros, that they had initiated multiple parallel proceedings, that they had substantially altered the subject matter and legal grounds of their claims during the closing arguments, and that they had waged a particularly virulent campaign against the RTBF on social media, with accusations of fraud and forgery. Furthermore, they relied on articles in which they were not even mentioned and on search engine effects that they failed to demonstrate.

The presiding judge ruled that the proceedings were intended less to recognize a subjective right than to pressure a media outlet to disseminate favorable information, in violation of its editorial independence. He characterized the claim as an abuse of procedural law and ordered the plaintiffs, jointly and severally, to pay 2,500 euros in damages. Pursuant to Article 1022 of the Judicial Code, which cites the manifestly unreasonable nature of the situation as a criterion for an increase, the litigation costs were raised to 3,000 euros. The Court of Cassation had previously held that a party’s conduct in other proceedings counts as an element of an unreasonable situation (Cass. June 24, 2010, C.09.0425.N). On top of that, there was a court filing fee of 165 euros.

Legal analysis and interpretation

The 1961 Act provides for two regimes, and the online text does not fit into either of them

The chair reviewed the application in light of Articles 8, 9, and 12 of the Act of June 23, 1961. These three articles are contained in Chapter II of the Act, which was added in 1977 to cover audiovisual media: the 30-day deadline, the registered letter, the 4,500-character limit, and the procedure whereby the chairperson decides on the merits of the case and serves as the court of last resort. Chapter I applies to printed “periodicals,” with different rules: a three-month deadline (Article 1), a response of no more than 1,000 letters or twice the length of the contested text (Article 2), grounds for refusal in Article 3, and a penalty for publishers who fail to publish the response (Article 5).

The three publications in question were articles posted on a broadcaster’s website. Are these “periodical publications” by an audiovisual producer, or periodicals? The decision does not raise that question, and the RTBF had no interest in raising it. The 1961 law contains no provisions governing the online press. A reference to the legal basis applied by the chairperson would therefore have warranted, at the very least, an explanation as to which chapter applies to an online text published by a broadcaster.

It made no difference to the outcome. Even under Chapter I, the three-month period would have already expired five years earlier, in September 2025, and Article 3 also requires a direct connection to the contested text. But it illustrates how inadequate the legal tools are for anyone who wants to have something corrected in an article that remains online. The Flemish Media Decree shows that there is another way. Article 113 of the Decree of March 27, 2009, on Radio and Television Broadcasting grants a “right to notification” to anyone who is named in a program as a suspect, defendant, or accused person and who is subsequently definitively cleared of charges or acquitted. The request must be submitted within three months of that decision becoming final. That is precisely what the plaintiffs in Brussels sought to achieve. However, this right applies only to Flemish broadcasters, only to programs, and only to those who appeared on screen as suspects. In this case, it would have failed on those grounds as well, because the RTBF articles did not mention the criminal prosecution.

The absence of an obligation to update is not an absolute rule

The president wrote that no provision requires a media outlet to systematically update its publications. That is correct as a general rule, but the reasoning should not be reversed to suggest that an archived article is sacrosanct. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in the Hurbain judgment (ECHR (Grand Chamber) July 4, 2023, 57292/16) that the Belgian court’s order requiring a newspaper publisher to anonymize a twenty-year-old article in its online archive was compatible with Article 10 of the Convention. A judge can therefore indeed intervene in an archive on the basis of the right to be forgotten. We previously discussed how the Ghent Court of Appeal weighed this issue in our blog post on the question When the right to be forgotten outweighs freedom of the press.

The difference from the Brussels case lies in the nature of the intervention. The right to be forgotten removes something: a name, an identifying element, or the ability to be found via search engines. The plaintiffs in the case against RTBF wanted to add something: a text that the broadcaster had not written itself, placed among articles that did not concern their prosecution. An order to anonymize limits the dissemination of information; an order to add a statement forces an editorial team to speak out. The latter constitutes the more significant interference, and the presiding judge rightly placed editorial freedom on that side of the scale. Journalistic ethics, incidentally, do include a rule requiring “fair” reporting of acquittals when a suspect has previously been identified in news coverage. However, that rule is enforced by the Press Council and the Conseil de déontologie journalistique, not by the judge in summary proceedings, and in this case, the Conseil had just declared the complaints inadmissible.

The anti-SLAPP law was applied for the first time—and immediately against citizens suing a broadcaster

The most striking aspect of this ruling is that the new anti-SLAPP law is being used against two citizens who are suing the French Community’s public broadcaster. The directive was drafted with the opposite scenario in mind: a wealthy plaintiff who uses litigation to silence a journalist or activist. Article 4(3) of the directive defines abuse of process as proceedings “in which unequal power relations between the parties are frequently exploited.” The Belgian transposition in Article 1385/1 of the Judicial Code omitted that phrase; in Article 1385/5, the imbalance of power is now merely one of the indicators that the judge may take into account “among other things.” The Brussels presiding judge therefore did not need to rule on the question of which party was the more powerful one in this case, and did not do so.

A counterargument is obvious. The law protects those who participate in public debate from claims that seek to restrict or penalize that debate. The plaintiffs did not want to have an article removed or a journalist silenced; they wanted more information online, not less. Can a claim that aims for more publication “restrict” public debate? The presiding judge did not explicitly answer that question, but his reasoning points the way: forcing a broadcaster to publish what it does not wish to publish infringes on editorial freedom just as much as a publication ban. Furthermore, the law considers not only the purpose but also the means. An initial claim of more than 7,770,000 euros against a broadcaster—for articles in which the plaintiffs were not even mentioned in some cases—meets the first criterion of Article 1385/5 regardless of who is making the claim. The ruling thus shows that the SLAPP classification is not reserved for powerful plaintiffs, and that even a private individual who brings an excessive lawsuit against a media outlet can be subject to it.

Two technical points illustrate just how new the law is. First, the petition was filed on October 23, 2025, while the law was not published in the Belgian Official Gazette until June 12, 2026. Procedural laws generally apply immediately to pending cases, and the presiding judge used Article 1385/5 as the framework for assessing conduct that largely took place in 2026, but the ruling makes no mention of that temporal issue. Second, Belgian law does not provide for a separate claim for damages in domestic SLAPP cases: Article 1385/6 governs only compensation following proceedings before a court outside the European Union, and Article 780bis imposes a fine on the State. The 2,500 euros awarded to RTBF is therefore based on the general law governing vexatious and reckless litigation, with the SLAPP indicators serving as the grounds. That is also how the Antwerp Court of First Instance ruled on June 4, 2026, prior to transposition, as we analyzed in our blog post on the question Whether a judge can penalize a frivolous lawsuit as a SLAPP without an implementing law. The Belgian legislature did, however, go further than the directive in one respect: according to Article 1 of the directive, it applies only to cases with cross-border implications, whereas the Belgian law applies to any proceeding, including a purely domestic one such as this.

Specifically, what does this mean?

For those who are mentioned in old news reports after being acquitted. An acquittal does not give you the right to compel a media outlet to mention that acquittal in articles that dealt with something else. If you wish to respond to an article, do so within the statutory time limit, by certified mail, with a text that directly addresses the disputed passages. If that time limit has expired, your only options are to pursue an ethics complaint with the Press Council or the Conseil de déontologie journalistique, or to contact the editorial staff directly; many editorial offices will amend articles upon request if the reporting has become inaccurate. If you do decide to go to court, keep your claim proportionate to what you actually want to achieve: since 2026, a claim for millions of euros to enforce the inclusion of two sentences has been considered an indication of abuse of procedural law. If you’re unsure what options are still available regarding an article that has been online for years, that’s the first thing we’ll look into for you.

For newsrooms and broadcasters. The ruling confirms that an editorial staff is not obligated to update its archives to reflect every subsequent development, and that a judge cannot compel it to publish specific content outside the scope of the legal right of reply. This does not relieve an editorial team of the obligation to consider the right to be forgotten when someone requests anonymization, as the case law on that matter is different. What is new is that, in response to an excessive claim, you can not only request its dismissal but also seek a SLAPP designation, which entitles you to increased litigation costs and damages. Claim those damages on the correct grounds: vexatious and reckless litigation, and not the fine under Article 780bis, which is payable to the State. Keep the documents that demonstrate the indicators under Article 1385/5, such as the original complaint with the full claim, the parallel proceedings, and the plaintiff’s statements on social media.

For parties to proceedings in summary proceedings. Urgency must exist at the time the action is filed and must still exist at the close of the proceedings. Anyone who invokes a new fact to make an old situation urgent again must demonstrate specifically that this fact creates a current risk of serious harm or exacerbates the existing harm. And anyone who has access to a special legal procedure, such as that provided for in Article 12 of the Act of June 23, 1961, must follow it; ordinary summary proceedings are not the appropriate avenue in such cases. We described how this can go wrong in cases of defamation and libel in our blog post addressing the question whether you can stop defamation and slander through a claim such as a motion for preliminary relief. You can read more about the limits of editorial freedom on our pages about media freedom and the right of reply; we discuss the new law on our page about the anti-SLAPP law.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Can I require a newspaper or broadcast station to amend an article after my acquittal?

Not based on a general rule. On September 30, 2026, the presiding judge of the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels ruled that no legal provision requires a media outlet to update its articles to reflect a subsequent acquittal, and that a judge cannot compel an editorial staff to publish specific content. Only the statutory right of reply, with its strict deadlines and conditions, confers an enforceable right. For Flemish broadcast programs, there is also a right to report following an acquittal.

Within what time frame must I request a right of reply?

That depends on the medium. For audiovisual broadcasts and programs, Article 8 of the Act of June 23, 1961, requires a certified letter to be sent no later than the thirtieth day after the broadcast or publication; the text may not exceed 4,500 characters or three minutes of reading time. For printed periodicals, the deadline is three months. If a response is denied, you may appeal to the presiding judge of the court of first instance within fifteen days. An email sent five years after publication, as in the RTBF case, is too late.

What is a SLAPP, and when am I at risk of being ordered to pay damages?

A SLAPP is a lawsuit that is not intended to enforce a right, but rather to prevent, restrict, or punish participation in public debate, using claims that are wholly or partially unfounded. Since the law of May 30, 2026, the court may, among other things, consider the disproportionate nature of the claim, the number of parallel proceedings, intimidation, and procedural tactics in bad faith. Anyone who litigates in this manner risks being ordered to pay damages, increased court costs, and a fine of up to 25,000 euros.

Should a news outlet never update its online archive?

The ruling does not go that far. A media outlet is not required to update its articles on its own initiative to reflect subsequent developments, but it may be required to anonymize an old article when the data subject’s right to be forgotten outweighs the interest of the archive. The European Court of Human Rights upheld such an order in the Hurbain v. Belgium judgment of July 4, 2023. Legally speaking, removing something from an archive and adding something to an article are two distinct actions.

Conclusion

The ruling of September 30, 2026, draws a clear line in Belgium: anyone who, following an acquittal, wants a media outlet to update old articles has no subjective right to do so, no urgent interest after five years, and no right of reply outside the statutory time limits and without a direct connection to the contested text. Anyone who nevertheless attempts to push that boundary with an excessive claim can, since the passage of the anti-SLAPP law, be held liable themselves—even as a private individual suing a public broadcaster. At the same time, the case highlights a gap in the 1961 law regarding online reporting, for which only the Flemish Media Decree offers a partial solution.

ICT Rechtswijzer is the knowledge platform of the Intellectual Property, IT Law, AI Law, Data Protection, and Media Law department at Everest Advocaten, led by Joris Deene, Esq. Our attorneys assist both individuals seeking to enforce a right of reply, a correction, or anonymization, and editorial teams defending themselves against such claims or against a SLAPP lawsuit.