17 Nov 09 | Uncategorized
OSCE media freedom watchdog Miklos Haraszti welcomes United Kingdom’s decriminalisation of defamation, urges other states to follow
“The United Kingdom is the first among the Western European participating States in the OSCE to officially decriminalize defamation. This is a crucial achievement not only for the country’s own freedom of speech, but a great encouragement to many other nations which are still to pursue such a reform,” Haraszti said.
An amendment to the Coroners and Justice Act decriminalized defamation, sedition and seditious libel, defamatory libel and obscene libel in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“My Office has recommended the decriminalization of defamation for several years. Although these obsolete provisions have not been used in Western Europe for decades, their ‘chilling effect’ remained. Their existence has served as justification for states unwilling to stop criminalization of journalistic errors, and leave those offences solely to the civil-law domain,” Haraszti said.
“I urge other participating States to speed up reforms and end criminal libel,” he said.”Defamation is a criminal offence in all except nine OSCE participating States — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In most countries it is punishable by imprisonment, substantially ‘chilling’ critical speech in the media. Most imprisoned journalists have been convicted for defamation.”
From OSCE
14 Oct 09 | Comment, News and features, United Kingdom
Carter-Ruck, the aggressive media law firm helping the Trafigura oil-trading company in relation to reports of its 2006 waste dumping disaster in Côte d’Ivoire, scored a spectacular own goal yesterday when it tried to keep the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question due to be asked today.
The Guardian asked for an urgent hearing to overturn the gag, which goes against free-speech privileges enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1688 as well as long-established legal precedent; Carter-Ruck withdrew before the matter came to court. It was the work of a few tedious minutes to skim through the Commons Order Book online and find the relevant question. In no time the news had been spread by flocks of twitterati.
The question refers to a previously secret High Court injunction banning the Guardian from mentioning the Minton report, commissioned by Trafigura in September 2006, which related to toxicity levels of the caustic tank washings dumped that August on the coast around Abidjan. Whatever the consultants said, Trafigura continued for three years to claim that they were harmless.
The company finally announced a weak compensation deal for some of the victims — with no admission of liability — on 17 September, the day after the Guardian published internal emails between Trafigura executives considering how to dispose of the toxic “crap” in order to profit from a cheap consignment of petrol from Mexico. The Minton report itself is available on the internet from the anti-corruption group Wikileaks.
Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have mounted a desperate campaign to stop the media from reporting on the illegal dumping, which is said to have caused vomiting, choking and skin eruptions in some 100,000 people and killed at least 12 Ivorians. As well as the injunction against the Guardian, the firm issued a libel writ against BBC2’s Newsnight, which also reported on the dumping, and threatened journalists from Norway, the Netherlands, Estonia and The Times. The Dutch Greenpeace campaigner Marietta Harjono has said she was told not to mention Trafigura on a British radio interview for fear of libel claims.
Carter-Ruck (known to readers of Private Eye by a slightly different name) specialises in protecting clients from “adverse or intrusive” media coverage, and boasts involvement in more than half the libel and privacy claims issued in the High Court in any given year. It offers a 24-hour “media alert” service, threatening media outlets in order to change or block unwanted stories before publication, and often works alongside PR agencies on behalf of clients facing “sustained and hostile media interest.” Obviously, the firm has found that its approach works — or why would it be so clumsy as to block a campaigning newspaper from reporting on Parliament?
Maria Margaronis is London correspondent for The Nation.
08 Dec 08 | Comment, News and features
Memorial’s historical archive must be restored immediately. An open letter from Orlando Figes and some of the world’s leading academics
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08 May 07 | News and features
Freedom House’s annual report Freedom of the Press, released last month, caused an outcry over the state of local media in Russia. Freedom House, a leading American civil rights watch-dog, put Russia on 164th place among 195 countries, and named the country “Not Free”. International press-freedom groups supported this evaluation: according to New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the second most dangerous country for journalists; Reporters without borders say that this country is 147th among 168 states, in terms of press freedom.
On 3 May, Koïchiro Matsuura, UNESCO’s Director-General, accused Russian authorities for the growing number of journalists’ murders and impunity, in the conference speech in Medellin, Colombia. Terry Davis, Secretary General of the Council of Europe released an accusatory statement on human rights suppression in Russia, highlighting the unsolved murder of the prominent journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
In response, the local officials and pro-Kremlin experts are persistently reminding that Russian journalists and authorities do not need any evaluation from the outside world to serve the public’s needs.
On the same day, Elena Zelinskaya, the vice-president of Media Union, (a Russian NGO uniting and supporting local media companies), and deputy chair at the Public Chamber’s Committee for Communications, Information Policies and Press Freedom, told the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy about a new project, Index of Press Freedom. The Russian Public Chamber and Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) will study the situation in the local media. The project participants are still to define the methods for this research, but Zelinskaya mentioned the economical level of each Russian region, the quality of journalists’ education, and regional practice of the rule of law as the criteria for such evaluation. ‘It seems to us that the evaluations that any foreign organization offers, are mostly based on the opinions… the experts’ views,’ Zelinskaya says. ‘We would like to use facts for our analysis. Our task is to understand what is going on in our country.’ According to Zelinskaya, the Public Chamber must ‘control’ press freedom in Russia, and the project aims to reveal the factors that influence freedom in media.
Anatly Kucherena, the chairman of Public Chamber’s Committee for Public Control over the law enforcement agencies, and the leader of Civil Society public movement, told Russian newspaper Kommersant daily that on Monday, May 7, he would send papers to Brussels for registering the new Association of human rights organisations. Human rights activists from Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, USA will participate in this association, which ‘will monitor civil freedoms in the West and prepare ratings, similar to those, where Russia is represented as an outsider.’
Denis Dragunsky, the editor of political journal Kosmopolis, says: ‘Russian press is obviously less free then in Finland and Sweden, for instance, but Russia is a European country, observing human rights and freedoms.’
Boris Reznik, the deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Informational Policies, told the local media that he was sceptical ‘such ratings’. ‘It is not clear what criteria are used for these reports,’ Reznik said. ‘At the same time, we should recognize that we are not totally successful in press freedom development. But the question is whether the journalists themselves need freedom. Today many media companies refuse to be free voluntarily. It is easier for them to be obedient.’
The majority of Russian journalists though believe that the local media is heavily censored. The Guild of Press Publishers, a nonprofit partnership of Russian publishers of printed media and industry suppliers, conducted a survey titled Media Market and the Prospects of Civil Society in Russia, which showed that around 70% of Russian journalists recognize the fact of censorship of the local media. Initially, the research aimed to prove that since Perestroika (Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms) started, Russian media transformed from propaganda into the true reporting, but the polls do not support this hypothesis. Virtually all Russian journalists deny the existence of press freedom in Russia. As for the public, only 27% of Russian citizens trust local media.
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