In what has become a historic decision, the Council of State of Colombia ordered the National Police to correct a statement given in 1996 that affected two businessmen, said the newspaper El Tiempo. The Director of the Police will have to give a press conference and correct the information given to a television news program as an “exclusive” that linked two businessmen with a drug cartel, said the paper.
While freedom of expression remains a fundamental right guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution, the court system has become an effective tool for crippling media organizations and silencing critical journalists and bloggers in the country. A timeline from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas shows that there were 16 cases of the courts being used to censor journalists in 2012 alone.
A federal judge in Miami, Fla. said that a Haitian-American journalist defamed Haiti’s prime minister when he reported on the Caribbean country’s purchase of a telecommunications company, reported the Associated Press on Tuesday, Feb. 19.
The Brazilian National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ in Portuguese) filed a complaint with the Public Ministry in Sergipe on Feb. 8, regarding its criminal proceedings against journalist José Cristian Góes, which began at the end of January because of a fictional post on his blog for the Infonet website.
The Mexican Supreme Court granted journalist Lydia Cacho and her publisher Random House Mondadori an injunction against a judicial order commanding they compensate a victim of a pedophile ring, according to MVS Noticias.
The Attorney General of Maranhão, Regina Lúcia de Almeida Rocha, claimed last week that the defense in the trial for the murder of journalist Décio Sá is attempting to “delay the course of proceedings” against the accused, said G1.
Lúcio Flávio Pinto, founder and lone reporter for the blog Jornal Pessoal, has won eight prizes, published 22 books and been sued 33 times for his work as a journalist. Pinto's experience is emblematic of judicial censorship in Brazil.
A Costa Rican journalist avoided a libel lawsuit after retracting accusations she made against the brother of President Laura Chinchilla, Adrián Chinchilla, in an August 2012 article published in the newspaper La Nación.
Courts in Pará ruled once again against journalist Lúcio Flávio Pinto, winner of last year's Vladimir Herzog Amnesty and Human Rights Award, among several other accolades for his work in recent years.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF in French) released a report on the status of journalism in Brazil on Thursday, Jan. 24.
After a nine-year legal process that involved several courts, the Supreme Court of Justice in Chile absolved a journalist accused of slander, according to the web portals of Cooperativa Chile and the country's judicial branch.
Concerned about the growing threat of slander and libel lawsuits as tool to censor the press, the Free Press Foundation (FLIP in Spanish) released "Outside Justice: a manual for journalists facing slander and libel charges,".