Ethics Newsline®

VARIOUS DATELINES
Stories highlighting free-speech issues appeared in the world press last week. Among them:

• The editor in chief of a weekly Turkish-Armenian language newspaper, along with the paper’s publisher, last week received one-year prison sentences for “insulting Turkishness.” But the Istanbul court then suspended the sentences based on the fact that neither man had a criminal record, reports the Turkish edition of MSNBC. Both men were found guilty under a controversial article of the Turkish penal code that criminalizes any writing that legitimizes the claim that Armenians were massacred in eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1917. In a Sunday editorial, the Boston Globe characterizes Turkey’s view as “willful amnesia,” but spoke out against a pending U.S. congressional resolution that would officially recognize the killings as genocide.
• A journalism watchdog group has criticized Jordan for sentencing the head of an opposition party to two years in prison for claiming that corruption among Jordanian officials is worsening, according to the International Herald Tribune. The group, Reporters Without Borders, issued a statement assailing Jordan as a “country where there is absolutely no respect for the right to inform and be informed when someone wants to express opposition to the monarchy or criticize the regime’s leading players.” Jordon recently passed a law that severely restricts criticism of the government.
• A major ruling in Britain last week strengthened the media’s right to report on matters that are in the public interest. According to a report from the Times of London, the author of a book about alleged police corruption, who was sued for libel by one of the police officers mentioned in the book, was cleared after the court ruled the author had taken reasonable steps to verify the story, and therefore was protected by a “public interest” defense. The Times reports that this is apparently the first case in which that particular defense has been applied to book publishing.