COSTA RICA II

COSTA RICA-LA NACION WHEREAS a verdict against La Nación, upheld by the Supreme Court on June 25, 1999, requires the unprecedented publication of the complete text of the court's ruling in the first several pages of the newspaper printing the ruling would take up at least seven pages that the newspaper normally sets aside for national and other news of general interest, as well as already-committed advertising the requirement of allocating this space under the ruling violates Principle 5 of the Declaration of Chapultepec and effectively constitutes censorship because it makes it impossible to publish the usual selection of news and deprives the newspaper's editors of their authority to decide what prominence to give to news items, which is their prerogative; it violates the freedom of the paper to sell advertising space in pages where the ruling is ordered to be printed; the cost of complying with this requirement disproportionately increases the fine that was imposed under laws which are out of line with the spirit of modern practice in democratic countries the ruling in the lawsuit brought by former Justice Minister Juan Diego Castro demonstrates once again the backward state of press freedom in Costa Rica, which has been a constant concern of the Inter American Press Association THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE IAPA RESOLVES to express its concern at the harmful precedent that this ruling sets to respectfully but emphatically urge that Costa Rican judges, government officials, political leaders, intellectuals, academics and legislators take an active role in defending and promoting Costa Rican press freedom, without which it is impossible to fully exercise other freedoms to request, without suggesting any intent to interfere with jurisdictional institutions of any country in the hemisphere, that Costa Rican judges reflect upon the press' role in democratic societies and the harm to democratic development posed by the narrow judicial confines in which the Costa Rican press operates.