No more leaks
By Lubomír Sedlák Posted Sep 30 2009
Under an amendment to the Czech criminal code that went into force April 1, the country’s media will only be allowed to publish texts of telephone conversations taped by the police after they have been “used as evidence in court proceedings.”
The new piece of legislation, which local journalists have nicknamed “the muzzle law,” was approved by the Czech Parliament’s lower chamber as well as the Czech President, Václav Klaus, over the fervent opposition of the country’s senate.
Media representatives say the amendment goes against the country’s constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and expression. They say the legislation is nothing more than a political reaction by local politicians to the printing of wiretapped conversations in broadsheet daily Dnes in September 2008. Those articles caused a scandal involving members of the ruling right-of-center Civic Democratic Party (ODS).
The texts in question, taped in 2000 and 2001, revealed that current Minister of Interior, Ivan Langer, and major parliamentary deputy for the ODS, Vlastimil Tlusty, were both communicating with well-known Mafioso František Mrázek via a third person. Mrázek, who was killed by an unknown sniper in early 2006, tried to bribe the government officials in exchange for receiving insider information. Langer promised to lobby for Mrázek‘s friend at the Ministry of Finance, although Langer now claims he has never been aware that the two men were close.
Given the possible political dividends that could have been gained by such scandalous news, it’s interesting to note that the new amendment only passed because of the support of members of the opposition Social Democratic Party (CSSD). To Dnes’s editor-in-chief, Michal Musil, this shows that the new law benefits all local politicians, regardless of their political bent.
One of the country’s few politicians who voted against the amendment is CSSD member of parliament and former Minister of Interior František Bublan. “I know what kind of political pressure the police (are) under, so publishing texts of phone conversations is sometimes the last resort solution for how to inform the public,” Bublan says.
One of the biggest problems with the new law, says Dnes editor Musil, is that unlike all other countries of the European Union (or the United States, for that matter), it doesn’t take into account the public interest served by printing the material. Now the only way Czech journalists can print classified wiretaps, adds editor-in-chief of the news department at Czech public television Ceská Televize, Michal Petrov, is to leave the country and go to neighbouring Slovakia, for example, and renounce their Czech citizenship.
Marek Benda, the parliamentary deputy for ODS who drafted the law, does not think the law is harmful to the public interest: “The amendment does not allow media to reveal personal data about people, and these are being protected in practically all (democratic) countries—if, on the other hand, the information would be evidently pointing to some unlawful behavior, then it can be made public, although only after it is also branded as such by the court.” Benda adds that just because a politician is in telephone contact with a person linked to the underworld (who has, moreover, never been convicted of any criminal offense), that is not a proof of misconduct.
The problem with the argument that all illegal phone conversations will eventually become fair game for journalists under the law is that, even the in case that prompted the law, the conversations have not been admitted as evidence—therefore, they’re illegal to publish. The phone conversations between Mrázek and some of the Czechs in high politics never reached the courts that could have used it as evidence. On this point, Dnes recently quoted the country’s Prime Minister, Miroslav Topolánek, saying that “the police and the secret service … were silenced or intimidated.” (Despite these comments, he later voted in the Parliament for the law amendment, not against it—more evidence that the law benefits all politicians.)
Petrov notes that he is against the law because it criminalizes journalists instead of trying to prevent the police—including members of the secret police and also prosecutors—from leaking taped conversation to the media. “This is unacceptable, even in cases when it isn’t in public interest to run such texts in the press or on radio and television,” he says.
One of the main reasons why Benda decided to work on the new law in the first place, according to local weekly Respekt, is because he considers most of the published content to be irrelevant. “Ninety percent of the telephone conversations between representatives of our football teams and referees (which were published some years ago) had nothing to do with corruption,” he says. “They were just gossip, such as when they were discussing the female qualities of the sole Czech woman referee.”
Other parts of Europe have begun to take notice of the law. Articles about the law have appeared in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad. Press freedom organizations like Reporters Without Borders and the World Association of Newspapers have also spoken out against the new legislation.
For their part, media consumers have responded by urging the local papers to protest the law. Several local papers have received letters urging them to simply stop writing about the country’s politicians.
Not all politicians are giving in to the pressure to use the law to insulate themselves from press scrutiny. A group of more than 15 senators from the Parliament’s Upper Chamber, headed by its vice-chairman, Petr Pithart, are now putting together a complaint against the law amendment to the country’s Constitutional Court. Pithart, who is known for rejecting a bribe offer in the early 1990s, summed up the obvious reasoning for why the law should be repealed. He told NRC Handelsblad simply: “Czech politicians have a lot to hide.”