Miami, May 12 The Inter-American Press Association (SIP) warned this Friday that a bill in Peru that seeks to increase sanctions for the crimes of defamation and slander is “a serious setback for freedom of the press, the free exercise of journalism and the right of the public to information.
In a statement, the hemispheric body said that bill 2862, known as the “gag law” and which could be approved by Congress next week, increases prison sentences for defamation and slander to five years, and the fines between 90 and 120 days.
The sanctions, according to the IAPA, will be imposed in the South American country when it comes to the improper use of the media, social networks and websites against public officials.
“It contradicts inter-American jurisprudence, which requests that lawsuits against journalists be heard in the civil forum, not in criminal courts,” IAPA president Michael Greenspon, who is also global director of Licensing, said in the statement. and Print Innovation from The New York Times.
Carlos Jornet, president of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and journalistic director of Argentina’s La Voz del Interior, expressed concern about “the negative effect” that the bill would have if it were approved.
It would go “against the exercise of journalism and journalistic investigation and because of its consequences on the public’s right to information,” Jornet said.
In 2014, at an IAPA request that an international delegation sent to Lima, the capital of Peru, the then president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Enrique Mendoza Ramírez, urged judges to be more careful when admitting lawsuits against journalists when they had the intention of generating self-censorship.
At that time, the statement said, the IAPA had warned about the “industrialization of lawsuits” by officials to prevent journalism from continuing to uncover cases of public corruption.
For decades, and through its Chapultepec Project, the IAPA states, the agency “has been promoting measures to decriminalize defamation crimes against journalists, promoted by public officials in cases of public interest.”
Among the countries of the Americas that have decriminalized defamation are Argentina, Bermuda, Chile (partial), El Salvador, Grenada, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic (partial) and Uruguay, reported the entity, which is headquartered in Miami, Florida (USA). EFE
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