Poland Urged to Improve Press Freedoms
IHT has this story . . .
A regional media freedom watchdog on Monday condemned the sentencing of a Polish journalist for allegedly defaming a judge, and urged the country to decriminalize libel and insult.
Miklos Haraszti, media freedom representative for the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro he objected to the handling of the government’s case against Gazeta Wyborcza journalist Jacek Brzuszkiewicz.
Brzuszkiewicz was convicted of criminal defamation against a judge and received a six-month suspended prison sentence and a fine, based on a series of articles he wrote years ago. Brzuszkiewicz is appealing the verdict.
“After this new prison sentence, Polish editors will have to think twice before publishing critical stories about officials,” Haraszti wrote in a letter to Ziobro, excerpts of which the 56-nation OSCE released Monday.
Haraszti said the case, as well as other criminal prosecutions of journalists in Poland, reflected the government’s continued failure to change what he called “inadequate libel and insult provisions.”
“It is high time for Poland to decriminalize speech offenses to avoid embarrassing convictions of journalists for libel and insult in the future,” he said.
Meanwhile . . . the Kaczynski brothers scrap with Lepper, threatening their rule
The Independent . . .
Poland’s fragile coalition government teetered on the brink yesterday after one of its minority members, the rural and populist Samoobrona (“Self-Defence”) party threatened to pull its two remaining ministers out of the government headed by Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Squabbles within the coalition have racked the government for weeks, and Mr Kaczynski, whose twin brother Lech is President, has repeatedly tried to intimidate his allies into cooperating by threatening a snap election. If the coalition survives, the next general election is due in 2009.
But the situation has been aggravated since the Prime Minister fired the leader of the Self-Defence party, Andrzej Lepper, who served both as agriculture minister and deputy prime minister, after allegations of corruption surfaced.
Mr Lepper is described by one Polish source as “a peasant warlord of dubious reputation,” but the allegations against him remain hazy and the Prime Minister seems in no hurry to present the evidence. But he considered the corruption accusations strong enough grounds to sack Mr Lepper, who yesterday raised the stakes with the threat of pulling out his party’s other two ministers.
If the ministers left the government, it would almost certainly collapse, precipitating fresh elections. But after the threat was made, the Self-Defence party then changed its stance and said that it left the ministers’ fate in Mr Kaczynski’s hands.
Clearly what is under way is a game of chicken, with the Prime Minister daring the opposition to bring down the government, the opposition daring the Prime Minister to do the same, but each pulling back from the brink, tormented by fears that its hopes of improving its position after a sudden election are misplaced.
Mr Kaczynski originally fired Mr Lepper in September 2006, but then felt obliged to bring him back into the government to keep it alive.
6 August, 2007 at 9:47 pm
“After this new prison sentence, Polish editors will have to think twice before publishing critical stories about officials,”
Polish law is not case law – therefore court sentences don’t change anything.
Of course the law should be altered to comply with international human rights standards, but I don’t think it should be totally abolished. There should be a tool for people to defend themselves from indecent media articles. As you know sometimes media can turn people’s lives to hell before some case is thoroughly analysed.
A friend of mine was once a victim of such a journalist. One of the tabloids (the friend was in conflict with one of the editors there) published a manipulated story putting him in a very bad light: the story was later repeated for the whole day by all other media which cited the tabloid without checking themselves how it really was or referring to the person described. A formal investigation was launched after the media reports, and it took over 6 months for him to clear his name: however it took only one day to ruin his reputation. Of course no media were interested in informing he was innocent and the article manipulated. There has to be law that won’t let such things happen.