RUSSIA is rightly under constant criticism for suppressing free speech. Yet a resolution of its supreme court indicates a strikingly positive trend to develop the legal conditions for journalistic freedom.
Court resolutions routinely explain statutory norms on topical legal issues to the country’s lower courts. Last week the supreme court unanimously adopted a resolution on the mass media. Its novelty is not just in being the first such to directly interpret media law: it is extraordinary, too, in its content — directing all courts to provide free conditions for political journalism. It does so by detailing and interpreting journalistic privileges in gathering and reporting news and by ensuring certain freedoms for online media.
For instance, the court’s interpretation makes media outlets immune from liability for the content of a candidate’s campaign statements, which they are obliged to disseminate by electoral law. Interviews with public officials and leaders of political parties (along with their press officers) are now also protected in the same way.
The resolution discusses at length the media statute and civil code that allow reporting on a person’s private life if “necessary to protect the public interest”. The notion of such necessity has rarely been used in courts and never explained in Russian law. The supreme court challenges this stalemate by holding that the judges should make that fundamental distinction. It points to a difference between reporting facts — even controversial ones — contributing to democratic debate about politicians in the exercise of their official functions, for instance, and reporting details of the private life of an individual with no such role. While in the former case the press exercises its public duty by imparting information on matters of public interest, it does not do so in the latter. In this, the supreme court closely followed the arguments of the European court of human rights.
The supreme court also takes note of a provision in the statute obliging journalists to protect the confidentiality of sources, except when a competing demand comes from a judge in a court case. In that circumstance a court may indeed demand disclosure of a source, but only when all other means of discovery have been exhausted and “there is an overriding public interest in the disclosure of the confidential source”.
The resolution deals with an interpretation of the norms that allow media outlets to be closed down: the Supreme Court states that a court of law should take into account the context, such as the “aim, genre and style of a publication [or] a programme”. In particular the resolution refers to the declaration on the media’s freedom of political debate by the Council of Europe that says: “The humorous and satirical genre ... allows for a wider degree of exaggeration, and even provocation, as long as the public is not misled about facts.”
In the context of numerous cases in which journalists have been thrown out of courtrooms by overzealous judges for “overcrowding” them and “obstructing justice”, it is important indeed that the resolution explains that closed-door court sessions (unless directly stipulated by law) are unconstitutional.
— The Guardian, London
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Editoral-Russia to have a free press
0 comments:
Post a Comment