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One Russia Said to Be Divided Over Proposed Amendments to Libel Law

Posted on: Thursday, 1 May 2008, 21:00 CDT

Text of report by Gazprom-owned Russian newspaper Izvestiya on 30 April

[Report by Sergey Arkhipov: "To slanderers of Russia"]

The scandal created by Robert Shlegel, the youngest State Duma deputy, who has proposed beefing up the federal law on the mass media, has gotten an unexpected sequel: senior party comrades have reprimanded their young colleague for political mistakes.

What is more, a serious internal party debate has flared up within One Russia's [United Russia] ranks, confirming the suspicion that different "wings" exist in the party of power with views which frequently do not coincide.

Let us recall that Robert Shlegel advanced an initiative to beef up the law on the mass media - namely, to include a point making it possible judicially to take away the licences of those mass media which have "repeatedly published libel in the space of a year".

"I propose," the deputy said in a session of the State Duma Information Policy Committee, "including it (libel - editor) in the list of 'crimes' that may be committed by a mass medium in addition to propaganda of violence and terrorism."

Shlegel ascribed his stance to the fact that, in his opinion, the liability in monetary terms which the media have for the publication of unreliable information is "incommensurate with the profits being made and so does not stop these media when they publish unverified or even knowingly false information". "The print runs are large, but the fines are not serious, and they make more profit in a day," Shlegel added.

Shlegel's initiative has gotten a long way: the amendment to the Law on the Mass Media concerning libel has already been given its first reading by the Duma. But people unexpectedly came to light in One Russia itself who, while being understanding of Shlegel's concern at individual instances of misuse of the media, nonetheless deemed the young deputy's stance to be wrong. First, because the amendments duplicate another article of the law which already provides for liability for the dissemination of knowingly false information. Second... it is, after all, essentially a question of an infringement of one of the fundamental freedoms - freedom of speech. A statement was issued yesterday by one of the political clubs operating within the framework of One Russia - the "4 November" liberal-conservative club.

The statement, signed by the club's two co-chairmen - Vladimir Pligin, head of the State Duma Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State-Building, and Valeriy Fadeyev, chief editor of the magazine Ekspert - says that the amendments to the law proposed by deputy Shlegel "may harbour a threat of unsubstantiated and arbitrary sanctions against mass media".

"The law provides that an accusation of libel must, first, be proven during adversary proceedings, while, second, the sanction provides for the personal liability of the journalists and certainly not of the mass medium. The proposed amendments' replacement of the generally accepted legal term 'libel' by wording which does not include but interprets this term looks like an inexactitude which might 'help' to circumvent generally accepted legal procedures."

In the opinion of the One Russia members in "4 November", the proposed amendments enable an oversight organ, "based on its own conclusion, not on a court ruling", to issue warnings to a mass medium - with regard to facts whose definition coincides with the wording of the "libel" concept. And then, based on the aggregate of these warnings, to demand the suspension of the mass medium's activity.

Members of the "4 November" club believe that the fact that there are people in the field of journalism who violate journalistic and human ethics must not serve as grounds for arbitrariness towards mass media. "Oversight and law-enforcement agencies already have sufficient opportunities to put an end to the activities of unscrupulous journalists without jeopardizing the freedom of the mass media," the statement reads.

Special emphasis is placed on regional mass media. It follows from the statement that they will suffer most of all as a result of the amendments made to the law. In regions where mass media "are weak, suffer from arbitrariness and are dependent on the local regime and local capital", the adopted amendments may become an extremely convenient instrument to deal with unwelcome people.

All the country's professional journalistic organizations have also spoken out against the amendments to the law on the mass media. Journalists understand better than anyone that it is impossible to enhance the quality and degree of the Russian mass media's freedom by means of further punitive measures.

Political experts have drawn attention to the fact that the debate which has flared up over this within One Russia is probably the first instance where the party has asked the public to pass judgment on internal disagreements over such a fundamental issue. Many believe that this is only the start of a process of turning One Russia into a modern European-style party, where important decisions are adopted as a result of acute internal party debates.

Originally published by Izvestiya, Moscow, in Russian 30 Apr 08 pp 1, 4.

(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

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