Joris DeeneUnder Belgian law, anyone who feels their reputation has been damaged by a newspaper article can generally only hold the journalist liable, not the publisher. Article 25 of the Constitution stipulates that the publisher cannot be prosecuted if the author is known and resides in Belgium, and the Court of Cassation also applies this rule to civil liability. A Brussels lawyer learned this firsthand when he sued the newspaper Le Soir and one of its journalists following four articles about Prince Laurent’s attempts to collect a debt from Libya. On November 20, 2025, the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels did find a journalistic error, but did not award damages because the newspaper had quickly corrected the error itself.
In short:
- The court declared the claim for damages against the publisher Rossel & Cie inadmissible with respect to the three articles signed by a journalist, pursuant to Article 25, paragraph 2, of the Constitution; only the unsigned article remained for the publisher to address.
- The court ruled that the articles published on January 15 and February 6, 2020, together constituted an error, but that two interviews with the plaintiff on February 18 and 19, 2020, had corrected that error, so that nearly six years later, no additional compensation was owed.
- The court refused to order the removal of the four articles from Le Soir's online archive and also refused to allow the publication of the judgment.
The facts
The dispute centers on the nonprofit Global Sustainable Development Trust, Prince Laurent’s organization—which is now in liquidation—that planted trees in Libya. When the Libyan government halted those activities, the nonprofit obtained a judgment in Belgium ordering Libya to pay damages, but the money was never paid. Since then, various individuals, including the prince himself, have been trying to collect the sum, in part from Libyan assets that have been frozen in accordance with UN resolutions.
In that context, Le Soir published four articles in early 2020. The first, dated January 15, 2020, reported on the “threats and attempts at bribery” that the prince had complained about, without naming anyone. This was followed on February 6, 2020, by an article titled “Jean-Jacques C., the man behind the latest ‘attempt at bribery’ denounced by Prince Laurent.” In that article, the plaintiff—a Brussels lawyer and businessman—was identified “beyond any doubt” as the person the prince was referring to, with reference to a message he had sent to the prince on January 5.
That same day, a third article by the same journalist was published, concerning an investigation by the President of the Brussels Bar Association into the fees the plaintiff allegedly hoped to receive had he been able to collect the claim on behalf of the nonprofit organization. A day earlier, on February 5, 2020, the editorial staff itself had published an unsigned piece titled “Libyan Networks: The Businessman Under Judicial Investigation in France,” with references to the Panama Papers, offshore companies, and a French complaint alleging blackmail and threats.
The plaintiff asked the publisher to remove the four articles from the website. When the formal notice sent by his attorney went unheeded, he sued both the journalist and the publisher, Rossel & Cie, in 2021 before the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels. He sought damages, the removal of the articles from the website, and the publication of the judgment.
The ruling
The plea of inadmissibility based on graduated liability
Tiered or graduated liability is the rule set forth in Article 25, paragraph 2, of the Constitution that the publisher, printer, and distributor cannot be prosecuted if the author is known and resides in Belgium. This rule protects intermediaries in the press from pressure: anyone who knows the journalist must address the journalist directly.
Rossel & Cie invoked that rule. The court largely agreed with it. According to the court, anyone who believes they are the victim of a press offense can only sue the publisher in civil court if the journalist is unknown or does not reside in Belgium. Three of the four articles bore the journalist’s name, and the journalist also resides in Belgium. For those three articles, the claim for damages against the publisher was therefore inadmissible. Only the unsigned article dated February 5, 2020, remained for the publisher to address.
The court did, however, draw a distinction based on the subject matter of the claim. According to the court, the requests to remove the articles from the website and to publish the judgment remained admissible against the publisher, because Rossel & Cie is the sole decision-maker regarding the content of its website. Regarding the journalist, the court noted that he might not have standing to defend himself against such a claim, but since he had not raised this issue himself, the court could not do so on his behalf.
The Claim for Damages Due to a Journalistic Error
The court read the journalist’s articles one after the other. The first article did not name anyone. Only those who also read the second article—in which the plaintiff was identified as the last person who had sought to profit from the situation—understood the scope of the allegations in the first. The third article provided rather vague information about the role of the bar president, after emphasizing that the plaintiff was the subject of an investigation regarding the four million euros he allegedly hoped to receive as a fee.
The court ruled that the articles did not directly accuse the plaintiff, but rather left it up to the reader to draw the connection. This technique, with references to the Panama Papers and offshore companies, leads most people to suspect complex tax structures, even though not every tax structure is illegal. The court also pointed out that the message on which the newspaper based its report—a WhatsApp message from the plaintiff to the prince—contained only the plaintiff’s own account of a phone conversation. While it was possible that the prince had viewed this as an attempt at intimidation, the message was insufficient to establish that. For readers of *Le Soir*, who were shown only excerpts, the conclusion that the plaintiff had threatened a member of the royal family was nevertheless obvious.
The court articulated the principle clearly: freedom of the press is and must be extensive, but it does not permit the defamation of a man’s reputation without proving the wrongdoing of which he is accused. According to the court, therefore, there was a mistake.
However, according to the court, that error was quickly corrected. On February 18 and 19, 2020, Le Soir published two interviews with the plaintiff, in which he was able to respond to the allegations and in which the newspaper also highlighted his achievements, including his French honors. The court viewed this as a kind of informal right of reply: readers could compare the opinion of the complainant, the prince, with that of the accused, who had the final say because the prince was not invited to respond. This allowed everyone to form a more complete and perhaps more objective judgment. Nearly six years later, the court found there was no longer any reason to impose additional damages.
The court reached the same conclusion regarding the unsigned editorial. The editorial staff had made a mistake by reporting, based on an article in Le Point, that a complaint had been filed against the plaintiff in France, even though a subsequent response on Twitter clarified that the case did not involve the plaintiff and that he had, in fact, provoked the complaint himself. Here, too, the plaintiff could have defended himself in interviews a few days later, so no additional compensation was owed.
The motions to have the judgment removed from the court records and to have it published
The court refused to order the removal of the articles from Le Soir’s website. The articles are part of a private archive to which the public has limited or unrestricted access, depending on whether a subscription is required. Anyone who searches far enough back will thus get the same overview as the reader who followed the coverage day by day in February 2020, including interviews.
The court also rejected the publication of the judgment. It found it difficult to justify in a case that the plaintiff had lost, and it feared that such a publication would stir up difficulties that most readers no longer think about. The court noted that the frozen assets at Euroclear under discussion today are Russian and no longer Libyan.
Legal analysis and interpretation
Why the publisher was spared for three articles but not for its website
The plaintiff sued both the journalist and the publisher, thereby running afoul of a rule that predates the Belgian state itself. The Court of Cassation had already ruled in its judgment of May 31, 1996 (Supreme Court, May 31, 1996, C.95.0377.F) that Article 25, paragraph 2, of the Constitution allows the publisher, printer, and distributor to escape all liability—both criminal and civil—when the author is known and resides in Belgium. To that extent, the rule limits the application of general liability law, at that time Article 1382 of the old civil code, which still applied to the facts of 2020. The Court reiterated this in its judgment of June 29, 2000 (Supreme Court, June 29, 2000, C.98.0530.F). The fact that the articles appeared online does not change this: since the ruling of March 6, 2012 (Supreme Court, March 6, 2012, P.11.1374.N) Digital distribution is considered a process equivalent to printing.
The dissenting opinion is contained in that same judgment of June 29, 2000. The Court of Cassation added at the time that a publisher who publicizes the distribution of articles—and thereby exacerbates the harm caused by the author—commits a separate fault distinct from that of the author. The graduated liability thus covers the mere distribution of an article by a well-known journalist, not every independent action taken by the publisher. The mere distribution of an article is therefore not in itself a separate fault, but the publisher remains liable for his personal fault when he bears actual responsibility.
The plaintiff could therefore have argued that the decision to keep the articles online for years, even after he had requested their removal, was an independent act on the part of the publisher. The court accepted that reasoning with regard to the claim for removal, since Rossel & Cie has sole discretion over its website, but not with regard to the claim for damages. That distinction is defensible: keeping an archive online is a decision made by the publisher, while the content of the article remains that of the journalist. Anyone who nevertheless wishes to hold the publisher liable for damages will have to identify a separate fault on the publisher’s part that goes beyond the dissemination itself, such as an editorial presentation that exaggerates the allegation.
Can a newspaper correct a mistake with an interview?
The plaintiff was found to be correct on the key point: there had been an error. Yet he did not receive a single euro. The court ruled that the two interviews on February 18 and 19, 2020, constituted a kind of informal right of reply that had remedied the harm. The right of reply is a right established by Belgian law: Article 1 of the act of June 23, 1961 on the right of reply gives anyone who is named or implicitly identified in a periodical the right to demand the publication of a reply, free of charge, within three months. The plaintiff had not exercised that right; the newspaper had given him the opportunity to respond on its own initiative.
The counterargument here is the law of strict liability itself. Anyone who commits a fault that causes damage must compensate for that damage. An interview in which the victim is allowed to defend themselves is not compensation; it is a new publication in which the accusation is raised again, albeit with a rebuttal. A reader who read only the articles from February 6 may never have seen the interviews from February 18 and 19. Nor does the court say that the damages were zero, but rather that after nearly six years, there was no longer any reason for “additional” compensation, as if the interviews themselves were already compensation in kind.
That line of reasoning does hold up on a different level. The court assessed the reporting as a whole rather than article by article, and it took into account that the plaintiff was given the final word. This is consistent with how the European Court of Human Rights assesses the balance of news coverage: the entire series of reports counts, including the space given to the person concerned. Anyone seeking compensation would therefore be wise not to wait: the plaintiff did not file suit until 2021 and received his judgment in 2025. The longer a plaintiff waits, the easier it is for a judge to rule that time and the right of reply have already done the job.
Why the online archive remains available, even after an error has been identified
The plaintiff’s main request was that the four articles be removed from the website. That is the claim that matters most to a lawyer with a reputation, because an archived article remains findable through search engines. The court refused, and that refusal is consistent with the ruling Hurbain vs. Belgium (ECHR (Grand Chamber) July 4, 2023, 57292/16). In that decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that press archives are protected under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that interference with the archives is permissible only in exceptional circumstances, following a balancing of interests that takes into account, among other things, the nature of the information, the passage of time, and current public interest.
The Hurbain ruling does permit such intervention in the form of anonymization, and that is a dissenting opinion that the court did not address. The plaintiff sought the removal of the articles, not the anonymization of his name in the archive. Moreover, the Hurbain ruling concerned an article about a traffic accident that had occurred twenty years earlier, which no longer served any public interest; in this case, the articles in question were five years old and dealt with the collection of a debt owed by a member of the royal family—a subject that, according to the court itself, is still in the news. The court put forward its own argument: anyone searching the archive will also find the interviews and thus obtain the full picture. That argument presupposes that the reader will look beyond the first article—which is precisely what the court had previously questioned in its ruling when it found the error.
The refusal to publish the judgment is consistent with this. A judge may order the publication of his or her judgment as a form of restitution in kind, but the court found that this would be difficult to justify in this case for the losing party. As we previously analyzed in our blog post on the question of whether a A news outlet must revise an old article following an acquittal, under Belgian law, there is no general obligation for a newspaper to update its archives. This ruling confirms that the discovery of an error does not, in and of itself, change that.
Specifically, what does this mean?
For anyone who feels offended by a newspaper article. First, check who signed the article. If it bears the name of a journalist who lives in Belgium, the claim for damages against the publisher is inadmissible; direct that claim to the journalist himself. The publisher, however, remains the proper party with regard to actions concerning the website: removal, anonymization, or modification of the archive. Also consider the legal right of reply within the three-month deadline; anyone who fails to exercise this right and files a lawsuit years later risks being told that the newspaper has since corrected the matter on its own. If you are unsure whether to sue the journalist, the publisher, or both—and which claim has a chance of success—that procedural choice is the first thing we will examine for you.
For journalists and publishers. The ruling confirms that graduated liability also applies in civil cases and to online publications, and that the publisher is directly liable only for unsigned articles. The ruling also demonstrates the value of a prompt and comprehensive rebuttal: two interviews within two weeks were sufficient to avert a damages award. Such a rebuttal is effective only if it truly gives the person concerned a chance to speak and is presented last. Be aware of the downside, however: a series of articles is assessed as a whole, and insinuations that leave it up to the reader to fill in the blanks are interpreted as accusations.
For anyone named in a judicial investigation or a business dispute. A newspaper may report on a complaint or an investigation, but it must present the facts accurately. The editorial staff of Le Soir erred in this regard by attributing a French complaint to the plaintiff, even though he himself had provoked it. Such a factual inaccuracy constitutes an error, even if the source is another newspaper. Anyone who identifies such an inaccuracy should have it corrected immediately and in writing, because that correction carries more weight in a later lawsuit than damages awarded years later. Anyone considering filing a summons should also read our earlier analysis on the SLAPP Penalty for Those Who Frivolously Sue a Journalist and about the Choice of Proceedings in Cases of Defamation and Libel.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Who is liable for a newspaper article that damages my reputation?
As a general rule, it is the journalist, not the newspaper. Article 25, paragraph 2, of the Constitution stipulates that the publisher, printer, and distributor cannot be prosecuted if the author is known and resides in Belgium, and the Court of Cassation also applies this rule to civil liability. Only in the case of an unsigned article or a journalist residing abroad can you sue the publisher directly for damages.
Can I force a newspaper to remove an article about me from its website?
Rarely. Press archives are protected by freedom of speech, and the European Court of Human Rights will only allow intervention in exceptional circumstances, such as by anonymizing an old article that no longer has current relevance. In November 2025, the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels refused to order the removal of articles that were five years old, even after it had found that the journalist had made a mistake.
Do I have to request a right of reply before I sue a newspaper?
It is not a legal requirement, but it is prudent. The law of June 23, 1961, grants anyone named or implicitly identified in a periodical three months to demand the publication of a reply at no cost. Anyone who does not exercise that right and only files a lawsuit later risks the court ruling that the newspaper has since corrected the error on its own, as in the case against Le Soir involving two interviews within two weeks.
Is a newspaper also liable if the article appeared only online?
Yes, in the same way as with a printed article. Since the Court of Cassation’s ruling of March 6, 2012, digital distribution has been considered equivalent to the printed press, meaning that the rules regarding freedom of the press and graduated liability also apply to news sites. The journalist therefore remains liable for the content of a bylined online article; the publisher is the appropriate party to hold accountable for the management of the website and the archive.
Conclusion
Anyone in Belgium who wishes to sue a newspaper for a defamatory article runs up against the tiered liability set forth in Article 25 of the Constitution: if the journalist is known and resides in Belgium, he is the only one who can be held liable for damages, even for an online article. The publisher, however, remains the opposing party with regard to its website and archives. In its ruling of November 20, 2025, the French-speaking Court of First Instance in Brussels found a journalistic error but ruled that two interviews with the person concerned had corrected that error, and refused both the removal from the archive and the publication of the judgment. Anyone who wants to protect their reputation should therefore act quickly: exercising the right of reply within three months and filing a targeted claim against the correct party carry more weight than a lawsuit years later.
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 individuals and businesses who feel aggrieved by a news article with their right of reply, the selection of the appropriate opposing party, and claims for removal or anonymization, and assist journalists and publishers in their defense based on the media freedom and the media law.
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