Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CARIBBEAN: Media Want Restrictions Removed

Peter Richards

PORT OF SPAIN, May 12 2003 (IPS) - Caribbean journalists have called on a United Nations body to urge regional governments to review their libel and defamation laws because they restrict freedom of speech.

The resolution at a Jamaica conference sponsored by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also urged media practitioners to become ”more proactive in promoting principles governing freedom of expression as an inalienable human right”, and underscored the region’s ongoing battle over providing information to the public.

Defamation laws should be reviewed, the delegates told UNESCO’s Press Freedom Day gathering, to ”achieve the appropriate balance between freedom of expression, the public’s right to know, and the right to privacy and protection of reputation with particular reference to the balance between the public’s right to know and the public officer’s right to privacy and protection of reputation”.

The debate will not be news to observers of this region’s media. The matter was raised at a January 2002 special meeting of ministers responsible for information communication and technology, and later that year at a two-day UN symposium for Caribbean media personnel.

There, media owners expressed concern about "the anachronistic and oppressive libel laws that exist in Caricom (Caribbean Community) states". The situation has changed little since.

”The existing laws regulating and relevant to our print and electronic media need to be revisited and reformed to afford the media the liberation to which it is entitled in a society which promotes full access to information,” says Antigua and Barbuda based Queen’s Counsel and free press advocate Bernice Lake.

"When he throws his hat into the nation’s arena, the politician does so on the basis of an implied promise to promote and protect free speech in the social interest of honest, open and accountable government," Lake told a May 1 forum on press freedom and the public interest organised by the University of the West Indies’ Mona School of Business and the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communications (CARIMAC).

When she addressed the UNESCO forum that brought together delegates from as far as Afghanistan a day later, Lake said that some Caribbean laws ”virtually prohibit critical public discussion of matters before the courts (and) inhibit the press in a constitutional environment which prioritises freedom of expression as a core value of a participatory democratic society”.

”The law on contempt of court and the offence need to be reconciled with the constitutional guarantees to free speech and liberty and the right of the public to hold our courts to accountability,” she added.

Defamation laws can only be justified in limited circumstances, says Toby Mendel, head of the law programme at London-based Article 19, a global human rights and anti-censorship advocacy group.

"They should not seek to prevent legitimate criticism of officials or the exposure of official wrongdoing or corruption. They cannot be justified on the grounds that they help maintain public order (or) national security."

The UNESCO international conference and the UWI forum took place in a country that prides itself on a ”clear recognition of the place and value of the media”.

Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson said he was aware of the continuing lobby by publishers, media owners and managers in the Caribbean for constitutional changes and amendments to libel and defamation laws, ”which, they contend are required to better secure press freedom and reduce the financial and other risks from defamation”.

Patterson has indicated that he and other Caribbean leaders "are unlikely to find as persuasive any argument that by volunteering to enter politics, we have agreed to surrender the rights to a good reputation”.

”If we accept that there are attendant responsibilities attached to every right, that for every wrong there must be a remedy, it is evident that the questions raised by heads of the Caribbean media cannot simply be answered by legal expertise,” he says.

Patterson believes his regional colleagues might be more responsive to calls for reform if media owners and journalists developed their own "responsible code of conduct, which eschews censorship, while imposing professional penalties to protect any citizen or institution which has been undeniably wronged".

That might actually be on the cards. In January, local journalists created The Eastern Caribbean Press Council (ECPC), which has already issued a ”Code of Practice for Caribbean Journalists”.

The move follows an announcement by the leaders of the Eastern Caribbean states last June that they would create a press complaints commission to ”investigate complaints against the press and take appropriate disciplinary action”.

That plan came in the wake of sensational stories about some regional leaders, including reports of videotaped allegations involving sex and drugs against Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Lester Bird by a 14-year-old girl.

The ECPC’s code worries one observer. ”Media managers appeared to have decided to take pre-emptive action against the looming threat of direct intervention by OECS governments,” said Wesley Gibbins president of the Trinidad and Tobago-based Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM).

”It is good that such an option is being explored by the industry on its own,” he added, ”so long as it does not signal a willingness to subsequently submit to any new regime of official regulation”.

Later this month, the Caribbean will pay close attention to the decision of the United Kingdom Privy Council – the region’s highest court of appeal – as to whether former Jamaica government minister Anthony Abrahams will receive the 80.7 million dollars (1.4 million U.S. dollars) awarded to him by a Jamaican court in 1996 against the Gleaner Company over an article published 16 years ago.

The ‘Gleaner’ newspaper had re-printed a report by the Associated Press (AP) in 1987 that Jamaican courts agreed impugned Abraham’s reputation.

The story was based on statements supposedly made to a grand jury in the United States, and although AP subsequently retracted the story, the Gleaner did not.

The Jamaica newspaper has already admitted the libel, but challenges the huge compensation.

”The outcome will likely set legal precedent. Therefore, it is of considerable interest to public policy makers, media owners and journalists, Jamaica and Caribbean courts and the legal profession, scholars, human rights groups and the general public,” says Claude Robinson a senior fellow in the research and policy group at the Mona School of Business.

”At issue is, what are the appropriate legal restraints on freedom of expression and what are the appropriate remedies open to people whose reputations have been harmed by the press?”

”Two other related issues were whether elected and other public officials should ‘stand on the same platform’ as private individuals, and whether the press should be liable for repeating a defamatory article contractually obtained from an international news agency,” Robinson added.