14 LINGENS v. AUSTRIA JUGDMENT para. 2 (art. 10-2) enables the reputation of others - that is to say, of all individuals - to be protected, and this protection extends to politicians too, even when they are not acting in their private capacity; but in such cases the requirements of such protection have to be weighed in relation to the interests of open discussion of political issues. 43. The applicant was convicted because he had used certain expressions ("basest opportunism", "immoral" and "undignified") apropos of Mr. Kreisky, who was Federal Chancellor at the time, in two articles published in the Viennese magazine Profil on 14 and 21 October 1975 (see paragraphs 12-19 above). The articles dealt with political issues of public interest in Austria which had given rise to many heated discussions concerning the attitude of Austrians in general - and the Chancellor in particular - to National Socialism and to the participation of former Nazis in the governance of the country. The content and tone of the articles were on the whole fairly balanced but the use of the aforementioned expressions in particular appeared likely to harm Mr. Kreisky’s reputation. However, since the case concerned Mr. Kreisky in his capacity as a politician, regard must be had to the background against which these articles were written. They had appeared shortly after the general election of October 1975. Many Austrians had thought beforehand that Mr. Kreisky’s party would lose its absolute majority and, in order to be able to govern, would have to form a coalition with Mr. Peter’s party. When, after the elections, Mr. Wiesenthal made a number of revelations about Mr. Peter’s Nazi past, the Chancellor defended Mr. Peter and attacked his detractor, whose activities he described as "mafia methods"; hence Mr. Lingens’ sharp reaction (see paragraphs 9 and 10 above). The impugned expressions are therefore to be seen against the background of a post-election political controversy; as the Vienna Regional Court noted in its judgment of 26 March 1979 (see paragraph 24 above), in this struggle each used the weapons at his disposal; and these were in no way unusual in the hard-fought tussles of politics. In assessing, from the point of view of the Convention, the penalty imposed on the applicant and the reasons for which the domestic courts imposed it, these circumstances must not be overlooked. 44. On final appeal the Vienna Court of Appeal sentenced Mr. Lingens to a fine; it also ordered confiscation of the relevant issues of Profil and publication of the judgment (see paragraphs 21, 26, 27 and 30 above). As the Government pointed out, the disputed articles had at the time already been widely disseminated, so that although the penalty imposed on the author did not strictly speaking prevent him from expressing himself, it nonetheless amounted to a kind of censure, which would be likely to discourage him from making criticisms of that kind again in future; the Delegate of the Commission rightly pointed this out. In the context of political debate such a sentence would be likely to deter journalists from