Friday, September 21, 2007 Choice of venue works v. journalists facing libel
UNLESS the Revised Penal Code’s provision on libel is amended, journalists will remain vulnerable to harassment suits by irate news sources who abuse the venue rule.
Thus agreed the panelists in a media law forum held at the Marcelo B. Fernan Press Center yesterday as part of the Cebu Press Freedom Week Celebration.
Article 360 of the Revised Penal Code provides that a complaint for libel may be filed in the province or city where the libelous article is printed and first published or where any of the offended parties actually resides at the time of the commission of the offense.
But if the complainant is a public official, the complaint can be filed either in the place where the article was first published, the official’s residence or the place where the official holds office.
A lot of government officials who feel stung by media reports file libel charges in a venue other than where the article was first published.
Liberal, overall
This forces a media practitioner and his or her media outfit, already burdened by the cost of legal representation, to stretch finances further because of travel.
“A better law would be to limit the venue to the place where the community press is based,” Regional Trial Court (RTC) Judge Gabriel Ingles, one of the panelists, acknowledged.
A professor of law at the University of San Carlos, Ingles stressed, however, that the country’s libel law and existing jurisprudence remain liberal as far as journalists are concerned, the venue rule notwithstanding.
The adoption of the concept of qualified privileged communication, he explained, shields the journalist from liability over news reports that may contain defamatory elements.
The only requirements, he told forum participants that included mass communication students, are that the article is a “fair and true report, without any comments or remarks” and that it was not written or uttered without good intention or justifiable motives.
But it isn’t getting convicted that is most bothersome about a libel suit, though; it is the hassle of having to face it in some faraway court because of the venue rule.
Lawyer Pachico A. Seares, for example, is impleaded in four separate libel complaints, filed in two different venues, stemming from one news article reporting the filing of graft charges against two municipal officials.
Hometown
The complainants opted to file separate charges against the Sun.Star Cebu editor-in-chief, impleading in the process a reporter and the paper’s news editor, instead of consolidating it in one complaint so, a lawyer surmised, they could raise their odds of making sure that at least one complaint will make it to court as a formal criminal case.
Two family members of the officials also filed their separate suits, claiming that the article maligned them too.
One of the complaints was filed in Bacolod City even though Sun.Star Cebu is predominantly circulated in Cebu.
The plight of Leo Lastimosa, a veteran broadcast and print journalist, is another example. One of the cases Gov. Gwen Garcia lobbed against Lastimosa for his commentaries against her administration and the Cebu International Convention Center was filed in Barili, the governor’s hometown.
Lastimosa, represented by Atty. Celso Espinosa, has to travel to the municipality not just to attend his hearings but even to submit his pleadings and motions.
The Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas continues to “strongly condemn” the governor’s act and, as part of the Press Freedom Week celebration, has released a statement that will be repeatedly and simultaneously aired in all KBP-member radio stations today.
“We perceive such actuations as pure harassment to a dedicated media man who only does his solemn and moral obligation as a columnist and broadcaster,” they said. (KNR)
