By Adriana Prado
Carlos Santos, a journalist in Mossoró in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, was convicted to four months in prison for three blog posts that the city’s mayor found offensive, Mossoró Notícias reports. For each piece, he was sentenced to one month and ten days in prison and is required to donate approximately a total of $3,600 fines to charity.
Sylvio Costa, the director of Congresso em Foco, defended Santos in a widely distributed column: “Indeed, the journalist blogger is often over-the-top…But, whether it is in bad taste or not, doesn’t he have the right to express his opinion?”
“Generally, politicians use the courts as a means to intimidate journalists and bloggers, strangling the freedom of information that is guaranteed by the Constitution,” Costa continues, adding that Santos is facing 26 other civil and criminal cases by politicians whose honor he has allegedly offended.
Costa’s observation about the Brazilian courts comes at a time when both the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Knight Center have reported a drastic increase in politicians using the judicial system to silence critical journalists and media outlets.
The most famous ongoing case involves the injunction against O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, issued in July of 2009, blocking it from reporting on a criminal investigation into the son of Brazil’s senate president. See past Knight Center stories on this case here.
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Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
