Miami (July 3, 2014)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today offered its support for a request by several Dominican Republic newspapers that there be declared unconstitutional contents of the Law on Expression and Dissemination of Thought and the Penal Code that make defamation and libel criminal offenses, saying that these stipulations restrict press freedom.
El Día, Listín Diario, Diario Libre, El Nacional, Hoy, El Nuevo Diario and El Caribe today published a petition addressed Constitutional Court judges to eliminate “in a reasonable time” 11 articles of Law 6132 on Expression and Dissemination of Thought and five of the Penal Code which they regard as not compatible with the Constitution and the American Convention on Human Rights. They had presented the petition initially on February 25, 2013.
The newspapers maintain that the articles in question establish “a system of criminal persecution of privation of liberty for press crimes that is unjust and goes beyond the principle of reasonableness established in the Constitution.” They are also asking for the elimination of a provision in the Law that makes the editor of a media outlet responsible as the principal author of alleged defamation or libel.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, declared, “The repeated request of the Dominican editors and publishers is consistent with making defamation no longer a criminal offense, a trend in favor of freedom of the press and of expression that has been strengthened by case law and opinions of the Inter-American Court and Commission on Human Rights, respectively.”
The trend to such decriminalization is irreversible. In recent years defamation has been made no longer a criminal offense in Argentina, Bermuda, Chile (in a partial manner), El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay and there are currently legislative bills to this effect in several other countries.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
