Ukrainian parliament is flirting again with making libel a criminal offense -- a move that could destroy any attempts by journalists and others to expose corruption and wrongdoing among public officials.
A draft submitted on Aug. 19 by Yevhen Muraev, an independent lawmaker who left the Opposition Bloc faction in June, is pending approval of a law enforcement committee.
Meanwhile, journalist organizations are sounding the alarm about the possible chilling effect.
Muraev, owner of Kyiv-based NewsOne television channel, suggests adding to the criminal code new articles ensuring criminal prosecution for libel and slander. If approved by the parliament, libel published by the media will be punished with fines of up to Hr 8,500 ($320), community work, or even up to two years in prison.
Should the libel contain the accusations of committing a severe crime, the sanctions may reach up to Hr 17,000, or three-year imprisonment. For example, smuggling committed by officials, a subject of numerous journalist investigations, falls into category of severe crimes in Ukraine’s penal code.
With the new, toughened legislation Muraev says wants to protect citizens from deceptive information.
“Freedom of speech is not freedom of lies…This irresponsibility of politicians and mass media constructs a deceptive reality which hinders decision-making,” he said.
After cancelling criminal responsibility for libel in 2001, Ukraine’s lawmakers made numerous attempts to revisit the issue. Most notably, this was done in 2012 by Vitaliy Zhuravsky from ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. The law reinstating criminal punishment passed the first reading and was revoked only after the mass protests by the media.
The legislative changes introducing criminal punishment for journalists were also part of the infamous “dictatorship laws” passed on Jan. 16, 2014 at the height of Euromaidan Revolution. The laws were revoked after a series of violent protests in the aftermath of the vote.
Several media organizations and free-speech advocates, such as Internews Ukraine and Center UA, published a joint statement expressing their concerns over Muraev’s proposition.
Criminalization of libel is an instrument of media oppression and jeopardizes freedom of speech in Ukraine. In democratic societies, laws have been set to give the widest possible freedoms for the public and journalists to hold elected officials accountable.
Being scrutinized comes with being a public official, who by virtue of being elected to office have forfeited some of their claims to privacy. Libel is narrowly defined in many nations as involving the malicious dissemination of information that a journalist or other person knew to be false.
Additionally, most Ukrainians don’t trust their corrupt and ineffective judicial system, increasing the chances of political persecution for simply criticizing authorities.
As it is, VoxUkraine on Sept. 7 published their study on censorship and self-censorship at Ukraine’s most popular television channels. The study focused on the percentage of positive and negative mentions of President Petro Poroshenko in the Sunday news programs of four major oligarch-controlled TV channels: 1+1, Inter, Ukraina, and ICTV, since his inauguration in June 2014.
The results showed that positive mentions of Poroshenko amounted to 98 percent of those surveyed.
