PERSONALITY RIGHTS IN GERMANY
Claus Köhler*
DR. KÖHLER: My emphasis is a little bit different, but I will try to present to you a comprehensive system of protection of personality rights and statutory law. Of course, there is also a lot of case law. The statutory law is sometimes weak and has to be interpreted.
As to the overview, we will cover first the basic elements of the protection and then refer to sources of personality rights protection, referring to the question whether monetary damages can be awarded; but then we will get to the real stuff, to the protection of celebrities, like Caroline of Monaco or Marlene Dietrich, or the Michael Douglas/ Catherine Zeta-Jones/OK! v. Hello case, which was originally decided in the United
Kingdom, but I will give you an answer from the German point of view.
Let us go to the elements of protection. The general personality rights in German, “Allgemeines Personlichkeitsrecht”, is the right to respect and to the free development of one’s personality.
I think the protections are quite clear: (1) intimate privacy (confidential letters, health, sexual life); (2) prvate sphere (family life, “my home is my castle”; (3) sphere as an individual (life in public, business, professional activities). The intimate privacy is, of course, the most protected sphere.
Let us have a look at the rights. (1) Protection of privacy; (2) protection of personal honour; (3) protection against untruth and false allegations; (3) right to self-determination; (4) right to dispose fully of one’s own image in public and to decide on one’s own merchandising; (5) right to dispose freely of one’s own information (“Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung”; (5) right of one’s own picture.
• For example, the right to dispose freely of one’s own image in public and to decide on one’s own merchandising. You will need this right for the Marlene Dietrich case and also for the Catherine Zeta-Jones case.
• Another important right — there was EU harmonization on that — is the right to dispose freely of one’s own information.
• And, of course, the right of one’s own picture has also some importance in protecting personality rights.
• We have the protection of the general personality rights even in the German Constitution, and quite at the beginning, so this is a very important right and we do not have to refer directly because we have our own provision under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights.
Let us go to the legal sources. The legal sources of the Personality Right under German Law includes the German Constitution (“Grundgesetz”), Articles 1,2(1): the
