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  • Court Declares Journalist Wrong, Orders to Refute Nuclear Milk Report

    On December 22, the Economic Court of Minsk, Judge Tatsiana Sapieha, sustained the claim of Milkavita dairy company against Associated Press reporter Yuras Karmanau: the correspondent has to write and send to the news agency refutation of the report about radiation detected in milk produced a few kilometers away from the Chernobyl zone.

    The reporter has to com­pen­sate legal expens­es (840 BYN of state duty and 1500 BYN of lawyer’s ser­vices for Milka­vi­ta, equiv­a­lent of around 1 200 USD).

    Yuras Kar­manau is going to appeal against the deci­sion.

    The Board of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists denounced the court deci­sion in a state­ment express­ing con­cern over the sit­u­a­tion of free expres­sion and pos­si­bil­i­ty to hold inves­ti­ga­tions.

    “The court has tak­en the deci­sion dis­re­gard­ing the tes­ti­mo­ny of Aksana Drabysheuskaya,  a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Min­sk Cen­ter of Hygiene and Epi­demi­ol­o­gy, where she con­firmed before court that the center’s tests revealed stron­tium con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the milk exceed­ed the norm by ten times. At the same time, lat­er in court the rep­re­sen­ta­tive tes­ti­fied that the results were incor­rect.

    The arti­cle pub­lished in Asso­ci­at­ed Press is a jour­nal­ist inves­ti­ga­tion. Pub­li­ca­tions of this genre touch upon sen­si­tive issues and events and aim to ana­lyze the issue wider than a reg­u­lar infor­ma­tion arti­cle does. The inves­ti­ga­tion was held accord­ing to all norms of the genre, the text pro­vides all points of views includ­ing a direct quote from the offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Milka­vi­ta who said that the factory’s prod­ucts com­plied with all san­i­tary norms of Belarus.

    Lin­guis­tic expert assess­ment of the arti­cle proved that author’s tone is neu­tral.

    Arti­cle 52 of the Law on Mass Media direct­ly states that a jour­nal­ist “does not bear lia­bil­i­ty for dis­sem­i­na­tion of data not cor­re­spond­ing to real­i­ty, if that data are received from state bod­ies, oth­er state orga­ni­za­tions, their offi­cials, as well as are con­tained in offi­cial infor­ma­tion­al reports and/or mate­ri­als”. We draw atten­tion to the fact that the court reject­ed to include the Min­sk Cen­ter of Hygiene and Epi­demi­ol­o­gy as co-defen­dant, although this is the state orga­ni­za­tion that had pro­vid­ed the infor­ma­tion to the reporter.

    We are also sur­prised by the fact that for the first time in the his­to­ry of Belarus court reject­ed to engage as code­fen­dant the mass medi­um which dis­sem­i­nat­ed the infor­ma­tion – the agency Asso­ci­at­ed Press. The out­come of the tri­al dra­mat­i­cal­ly nar­rows free expres­sion in the coun­try, as it casts doubts on the very pos­si­bil­i­ty to hold jour­nal­is­tic inves­ti­ga­tions in Belarus.”

    6/10/2016 Dairy Com­pa­ny Sues AP Jour­nal­ist for Report about Radioac­tive Milk (Upd)

    7/12/2016 Expert Tes­ti­fies the Radi­a­tion Tests Were Incor­rect

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