CARIBBEAN:
PM's Lawsuit Sparks Latest Media-Government Tussle
Peter Richards
ST. GEORGE'S, Jun 15 (IPS) - An allegation by a Miami-based online newsletter against Grenada's Prime Minister Keith Mitchell is snowballing into accusations of curbs on press freedom, resignations and the possibility of a number of libel suits.
It has also led at least two regional media organisations to send delegations to the eastern Caribbean island and the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to dispatch a strongly worded letter calling on Mitchell to "desist from any efforts to curtail the work of the press".
The Grenada government-media battle mirrors situations in other Caribbean islands, to the point where prominent Dominican lawyer Anthony Astaphan has called on the region's leaders to enact broadcasting laws as a tool to deal with a "mass media of deception".
Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica and Guyana have already signalled they intend to introduce legislation that would govern programming content.
Addressing a convention of the ruling St Lucia Labour Party last month, Astaphan, a criminal lawyer, was highly critical of talk radio programmes in the nine-member Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). "What we have here is a mass media of deception," declared the lawyer.
Astaphan supports the controversial clause 361 in the new Criminal Code that the St Lucia Parliament passed in November 2003, which has been criticised by local and regional media groups as a virtual gag order.
The clause says, "anyone who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he or she knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years".
Human rights lawyer Martinus Francois says he is likely to go to the courts to challenge the clause.
"Section 361 seeks to take away every shadow of authority and credit from the most vulnerable parts of the constitution, in particular section 10, which guarantees and enshrines freedom of expression - the most sacred of all freedoms of a democratic society," Francois said in a letter to Prime Minister Kenny Anthony.
The 'St Lucia Mirror' newspaper says the clause "clearly provides for the same kind of repression that we are witnessing in Grenada".
"Section 361 has implications not only for journalists but for ordinary citizens as well. Any attack on the media is an attack on the public at large, whether in Grenada, St Lucia or anywhere else," the Mirror said in its editorial last weekend.
The controversy in Grenada began in May when 'OffshoreAlert' alleged Mitchell had received 500,000 U.S. dollars in a briefcase from the island's former trade counsellor, Eric Resteiner, in 2000.
Mitchell called the allegation "certainly not true", but admitted receiving 15,000 dollars from Resteiner while in Switzerland as reimbursement for using his own credit cards to finance the trip for himself and his delegation.
Insisting that he would be vindicated, Mitchell has since filed libel lawsuits against the Grenada operations of British telecommunications giant Cable and Wireless - whose subscribers allegedly repeated the allegations on the Internet - and David Merchant, publisher of 'OffshoreAlert'.
Further, Grenada's Government Information Service (GIS) warned media houses, "the full force of the law will be brought to bear against anyone responsible or associated with the publication of this story".
The Media Workers Association of Grenada (MWAG) called that an attempt by the government "to intimidate" local journalists and "an attempt to censor the media in Grenada".
The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) sent a four-member delegation, including this writer, to Grenada last week to investigate the situation. It called the GIS warning "an explicit threat and an attempt to silence the press".
But Grenadian newspaper publisher Leslie Pierre, an open supporter of the government, denied the announcement was an attempt to muzzle the press.
"There was never any effort to 'prohibit' publication of the matter and we carried it on our front page," he said in a letter to the Committee on Freedom of the Press of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), which was copied to ACM President Wesley Gibbings.
"Let me assure you once again that freedom of the press is alive and well in Grenada, and the best evidence of this is the 'Grenada Today' newspaper, which carries each week blatant and severe attacks on the prime minister and his government with impunity," added Pierre, who is also a director of the Grenada Broadcasting Network, which is 40 percent government-owned.
But Odette Campbell, the former GBN news director, who resigned after being suspended for participating in a walkout by journalists of a government press conference, warned that press freedom is under threat on the island of fewer than 100,000 people.
"Some people maybe never seem to understand what press freedom is and why the press should be allowed to be free to do their job. It is a core value that as a journalist I have grown up with and it is not something that at this stage in my life that I willing to give up," she said in a statement announcing her resignation.
The government insists it has not sought to curtail press freedom and that allegations it had ordered the arrest of journalists were untrue.
But local and regional media have slammed Mitchell's administration. The Mirror said that several actions by, or carried out in the name of the government were "nothing short of reprehensible".
Jamaica's 'Observer' newspaper wondered why criminal libel charges had been brought against Merchant. In an editorial, the paper also spoke of the "seeming eagerness to detain opposition politicians and journalists over these issues," and called a law against criminal defamation "out-of-date and wrong".
"Such laws, we think, are incompatible with the constitutional rights of free speech and undermining of a fundamental tenet of democracy: the right of citizens to criticise their leaders."
In its Jun. 9 letter, the CPJ told Mitchell that recent acts "of intimidation taken by your government are a clear attempt to obstruct Grenadian journalists from doing their work of disseminating information".
Mitchell says he does not agree with the perception that the law was being used as "a tool of intimidation".
"The Prime Minister responded that there was scope for debating the existence of such a law, but that it existed and was available for use by everyone in Grenada including himself," the ACM said in its report.
In 1999, George Worme, editor of the 'Grenada Today' newspaper, was slapped with a criminal libel suit after publishing a letter critical of Mitchell. That matter is now being heard in the courts here.
(END/2004)
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