DAVAO CITY (Mindanao Examiner / Sept. 5, 2013) – Two Filipino journalists were convicted by a court for a criminal case of libel after nine years of trial, local and international media organizations reported.
The two – Stella Estremera, editor-in-chief of Sun.Star Davao; and Antonio Ajero, the newspaper’s former publisher – were convicted based on the complaint of Baguio Saripada, a former Digos City government employee, after his name was included in the list of 32 suspected drug users and pushers who surrendered to the police. The article was published in the newspaper on July 28, 2003.
Both Estremera and Ajero said the report was made in good faith since it came from an official document supplied by police regional office, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.
It said former managing editor Ely Luciano was also a respondent in the same case, but he died three years ago. The NUJP has been demanding the decriminalization of Philippine libel laws since it is being used as a tool to harass members of media.
The Hong Kong-based Asia Human Rights Commission also urged the court to reconsider its judgement.
“If this judgement is neither corrected nor challenged, it will give rise to serious repercussions to the already fragile and narrowing space of the exercise of freedom of expression in the country. This judgement has put into question how the court interprets in protecting the right of journalists in ensuring that they can exercise freely editorial independence, and without fear of being prosecuted for criminal offenses,” it said in a statement sent to the Mindanao Examiner.
“The impact of the court’s decision, if it is not corrected, would be that any journalist, who reports and quotes official reports can be prosecuted tried and imprisoned. We are deeply concerned by the negative impact of the court’s decision. This decision exposes any journalist to unnecessary risks or threats of criminal prosecution. This could further lead to self-censorship, a decline in critical thinking, and of demanding accountability from government employee and officials,” it added.
AHRC said at the conclusion of the trial, Judge Carmelita Davin, presiding judge of the Regional Trial Court 18 in Digos City, held Estremera and Ajero guilty “for failing to get the side of complainant,” and imposed a P6,000 fine “with subsidiary imprisonment in case of insolvency” and P 200,000 for moral damages to the complainant.
It said the conviction is the latest case on libel involving journalists in the country. However, unlike previous convictions on libel cases, Estremera and Ajero were convicted not because their article was critical, but because they quoted a police report in it. In that report, the source of information by the reporter was a police blotter. According to the AHRC, in Estremera and Ajero’s case, the judgement is a regression to the standard of test and the threshold of what constitutes a crime of libel.
In the Philippines, libel is still a criminal offence in Article 355 of the Revised Penal Code and imposes a penalty of imprisonment and fine. The Government defended the keeping of libel as a criminal offence by law to protect “reputation” and “constitutional rights” of the aggrieved person.
It argued that the “enjoyment of a private reputation is a constitutional right” and that individuals are protected by law from “slanderous attack.”
“But Estremera and Ajero could not have damaged the reputation or slandered Saripada, the complainant, when they published his name in the article. They were reporting stories about alleged involvement of government employees in using and selling illegal drugs by citing official police reports.”
“These types of stories are of public interest. If any person is to be held accountable it should be the policemen who produced the report, not the editor or the publisher who merely publish by quoting the police report. The police investigation reports are official documents considered as reliable, not only by journalists, but even by the judiciary as accurate and authentic. They are presumed to be correct,” the AHRC said.
The AHRC said it understands that the right to freedom of expression can be subjected to restrictions, and is not an absolute right. “In this case, the issue is not whether the journalists caused damage to the reputation or violated the constitutional rights of the complainant because they merely published the police report for the public to read.”
“The utmost responsibility in protecting the ‘reputation’ of the complainants falls on the police as the originator of the report. As such, the responsibility for the supposed damage to the complainant’s reputation falls on the police as well, not to the journalists who merely reports stories about crimes the police investigated into,” it said.
The two journalists are expected to appeal the court’s decision. There was no immediate statement from Saripada about the conviction. (Mindanao Examiner)
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