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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Freedom of the Press?

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

More than once I have emphasized that although people here and in the West use the same words, they do not necessarily mean the same thing. A graphic example occurred last Friday evening as law enforcement officers began preparing to the assets of the Kievskie Vedomosti daily newspaper, which lost a lawsuit with Interior Minister Kravchenko. The paper, it seems, obtained damaging documents on the minister, whose main claim to fame is not having solved a single big-time murder, and nobody denied the truth of the facts they published. But under Ukrainian law, a public figure needs only show damage to his reputation and collect millions of hryvnias. It did damage Mr. Kravchenko's reputation, and the court awarded him five million hryvnias. Kyiv's finest came to collect.

One thinks back to the American case which determined for all time how the freedom of the press is understood in the USA. In 1735 one John Peter Zenger was tried (after nine months in jail) for seditious libel in articles he had published attacking the Royal Governor of New York. Zenger's lawyers did not deny what had been published but asked the jury to consider whether or not it was true. The jury decided it was, Zenger went free, and the Royal Governor had to live with his rightly besmirched reputation. Today in the United States a public figure can show libel only if he can demonstrate not only that the published information was untrue but that the journalist knew it was false beforehand and "maliciously" published it anyway. This may also have its problems, but it serves to guarantee a degree of openness that makes the type of diddling with big cars Ukraine's Minister of Interior was documented as having done much more dangerous than here, not least to his reputation. In short, under current Ukrainian law something like the Watergate scandal would be impossible. Nixon could simply have shut down the Washington Post as certain forces seem determined to do with Dneprovskaia pravda in Dnipropetrovsk. Obviously, when Americans and Ukrainian officials talk about the freedom of the press, they have very different things in mind. And maybe that has something to do with this country's notoriety when it comes to things like corruption.

 

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