Parents Appeal To Court Over Access To Dead Girl's Facebook Account

The German Federal Court of Justice, a top civil court would rule on access to the Facebook of a 15-year-old deceased girl, who died in 2012 on July 12. The parents of the girl, who fell in front of a Berlin underground train in 2012, are hoping for a reversal of an earlier ruling by a Berlin court that based its decision on the law regarding confidentiality in telecommunications. The BGH said that this would not be the central issue in its ruling. The court indicated that the key issue was whether digital information could be seen as equivalent to analogue; in other words, whether survivors of the deceased could read chats and emails in the way they could letters. The BGH, sitting in Karlsruhe, said on Thursday it would publish its ruling on July 12. The girl’s parents have lived with uncertainty over whether their daughter died as the result of an accident or committed suicide and are hoping for a clue from the Facebook contents. Facebook has blocked the account for reasons of data protection, noting that release would affect all the users the girl had been in contact with. (dpa/NAN)]]>