In June 1999, Portuguese television journalist Sofia Pinto Coelho showed on air a copy of a court document indicated a senior police officer had been charged with leaking information about a major case.

The officer, who had recently been fired, was suspected of illegally disclosing the details of a case concerning a private university and a commercial company.

Pinto Coelho was convicted by a Portuguese court in October 2006 for disseminating copies of court information during the preliminary stages of a trial, an automatically punishable offence in Portugal.

She was given a 400 euro fine.

After losing two appeals in Portugal, Pinto Coelho filed her case with the European Human Rights Court in June 2009.

“Ms. Pinto Coelho’s conviction had constituted a disproportionate interference in her right to freedom of expression,” the Strasbourg-based court ruled Tuesday.

The court also found that Portugal’s “absolute ban” on a particular type of information “was difficult to reconcile with the right to freedom of expression.”