An opinion has been going around that the \u201cguilty\u201d party in recent lawsuits against news outlets was the 2010 legislative amendments, or, to put it more accurately, the decriminalization of libel and slander. And, as if, if that didn\u2019t happen, the fines against media wouldn\u2019t be as strict and, generally, there wouldn\u2019t be so many lawsuits.<\/p>\n
We can agree with those who express such points of view on only one issue; that is, after decriminalization, lawsuits increased, because entering court with a civil suit is easier than launching a criminal lawsuit (moreover, we forewarned about such developments during discussion of the bill). However, that fines and other punishments are being applied to news outlets, the \u201cguilt\u201d of the laws that made amendments to the Criminal and Civil Codes cannot be considered to be fully proven.<\/p>\n
Let me explain with an example: in 2009, when these amendments weren\u2019t yet made and and the concept of compensation for moral damages wasn\u2019t yet defined, the Court of General Jurisdiction of Kentron (Center) and Nork Marash Administrative Districts of Yerevan sustained Robert Kocharian\u2019s son Levon Kocharian\u2019s suit against local daily Haykakan Jamanak (\u201cArmenian Times\u201d) and obliged the newspaper to pay 3 million 620 thousand Armenian drams (about $9,918 US) in compensation (the plaintiff had asked for 16 million 200 thousand drams, or about $44,384 US). Later, the appeals court reduced this amount by 620 thousand (about $1,700 US). But this doesn\u2019t change the essence of the ruling. They mandated the paper to pay \u2014 calculated through what means it\u2019s not known \u2014 in truth, a random amount. The amount, by the way, was greater than the maximum (2 million drams, or about $5,479 US) that the court can set after the amendments were made to the Civil Code.<\/p>\n
This one example is enough to show that if the authorities really want to punish any news outlet, then it\u2019s not important through which Code or article of which law they\u2019ll do that. For them, it\u2019s important to reach their goal of prompting a warning to and intimidating journalists. And any ruling they\u2019ll receive does not present any difficulties for the authorities and oligarchs, since in Armenia, the judicial system, unfortunately, is not yet independent; moreover, it is completely dependent on the other two wings of government (and not only those).<\/p>\n
And if the judicial system was independent and didn\u2019t have this issue of unconditionally punishing journalists and news outlets, then, based on the law, it should have denied the majority of lawsuits. Take, for example, the three notorious oligarch MPs\u2019 lawsuit against the same Haykakan Jamanak. It\u2019s true, the paper had not provided sources in the first piece which became grounds for the suit; however, later it had provided its source, Moscow\u2019s Unity club manager Smbad Karakhanyan. Moreover, the latter had stated a few times that he\u2019s responsible for the statements. If the court didn\u2019t comment arbitrarily on the corresponding provision in the Civil Code, it should\u2019ve denied the lawsuit. But because it wanted to punish the paper once again, it approved the ruling to pay each plaintiff a compensation of over 2 million drams.<\/p>\n
This and other lawsuits could\u2019ve been denied as well, based on the precedents of the European Court of Human Rights (for example, in the cases of Lingens and Oberschlick). According to these precedents, \u201cthe limits of permissible criticism are wider as regards a politician as such than as regards a private individual. A politician inevitably and knowingly lays himself open to close scrutiny of his every word and deed by both journalists and the public at large, and he must display a greater degree of tolerance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Armenia\u2019s public figures (politicians of different calibers and other individuals under public scrutiny) don\u2019t tolerate any criticism or any, even insignificant, information about their lives. And since they\u2019re confident of achieving victory in court, instead of applying the more unlawful methods of persecuting news outlets in the past (assault, setting their cars on fire, restricting a paper\u2019s circulation and so on), they\u2019ve begun to \u201crely on\u201d the law and the courts. And, well, the court, as we noted above, never \u201cdisappoints\u201d those who launch lawsuits against the media. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An opinion has been going around that the \u201cguilty\u201d party in recent lawsuits against news outlets was the 2010 legislative amendments, or, to put it more accurately, the decriminalization of libel and slander. And, as if, if that didn\u2019t happen, the fines against media wouldn\u2019t be as strict and, generally, there wouldn\u2019t be so many lawsuits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critique","author_posts-mesrop-harutyunyan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}