Epress.am News from Armenia
The first quarter in 2011 was unprecedented in terms of the abundance of lawsuits against news outlets, said Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression (CPFE) Chair Ashot Melikyan, speaking to journalists in Yerevan today and discussing the CPFE quarterly report, which refers to the situation of freedom of speech in the country and violations in the rights of media.
According to Melikyan, the trend in resolving issues with the media through the courts is more due to the intolerance of politicians and other officials in seeing their names in media reports.
Report particularly notes that the most noticeable among these was second president of the Republic of Armenia Robert Kocharian and his family.
“The problem in our country is that an impartial judicial system has not yet been established and rarely in practice are fair and just verdicts issued in connection with suits against media,” he said.
The CPFE report notes that in the first quarter of 2011, there were 15 recorded incidents of pressure on media and media professionals, which rose by 11 incidents as compared to the same period last year. There were also 4 instances of violations of the right to seek and impart information from Jan. to Mar. 2011.
Melikyan particularly addressed the case of local daily Haykakan Jamanak (“Armenian Times”) v. Ruben Hayrapetyan, Samvel Aleksanyan and Levon Sargsyan.
Recall, the three MPs sued and won a libel suit against the paper for an article that stated that Russian law enforcement agencies had created a list in which different Armenian officials and businessmen were named as being connected to a number of criminal cases and Russian criminal groups. The three plaintiffs were among those named by the paper.
In Feb. of this year, a Yerevan court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and mandated the newspaper to pay 2 million 44 thousand drams (about $5,520 US) to each of the three plaintiffs in compensation for material that discredited their honor, dignity and business reputation.