The draft law on amendments to the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine suggesting increased responsibility for attacks on the honor, dignity and business reputation of a person should be removed from the agenda of the Verkhovna Rada, according to representatives of a number of media organizations in Ukraine.
“We demand this bill be repealed. Any amendments are out of the
question,” the executive director of the Institute of Mass Information,
Viktoria Siumar, said at a meeting of the interagency working group in
charge of analyzing the compliance with the law on freedom of expression
and the protection of the rights of journalists in Kyiv on Wednesday.
A representative of the Stop Censorship! Organization, Mustafa Nayem, said there could be no negotiations on this issue.
The Ukrainian president’s representative in the Verkhovna Rada and
member of the Party of Regions’ faction, Yuriy Myroshnichenko,
questioned the relevance of this bill, in particular, on the eve of
parliamentary elections.
According to him, such initiatives should emerge as a result of
public discussion and be understandable for society and be in the public
interest.
At the same time, the author of the bill, MP Vitaliy Zhuravsky from
the Party of Regions told the meeting that he took into account European
experience while drafting this bill. “Such criminal responsibility is
in Austrian, French, Czech, and Polish legislation. This is the
experience that we have used while drafting this bill… Unless the
defamation is criminalizes, people, based on Ukraine’s realities, will
resort to lynch law,” he said.
