Court Declares Journalist Wrong, Orders to Refute Nuclear Milk Report

The reporter has to com­pen­sate legal expens­es (840 BYN of state duty and 1500 BYN of lawyer’s ser­vices for Milka­vi­ta, equiv­a­lent of around 1 200 USD).

Yuras Kar­manau is going to appeal against the deci­sion.

The Board of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists denounced the court deci­sion in a state­ment express­ing con­cern over the sit­u­a­tion of free expres­sion and pos­si­bil­i­ty to hold inves­ti­ga­tions.

“The court has tak­en the deci­sion dis­re­gard­ing the tes­ti­mo­ny of Aksana Drabysheuskaya,  a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Min­sk Cen­ter of Hygiene and Epi­demi­ol­o­gy, where she con­firmed before court that the center’s tests revealed stron­tium con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the milk exceed­ed the norm by ten times. At the same time, lat­er in court the rep­re­sen­ta­tive tes­ti­fied that the results were incor­rect.

The arti­cle pub­lished in Asso­ci­at­ed Press is a jour­nal­ist inves­ti­ga­tion. Pub­li­ca­tions of this genre touch upon sen­si­tive issues and events and aim to ana­lyze the issue wider than a reg­u­lar infor­ma­tion arti­cle does. The inves­ti­ga­tion was held accord­ing to all norms of the genre, the text pro­vides all points of views includ­ing a direct quote from the offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Milka­vi­ta who said that the factory’s prod­ucts com­plied with all san­i­tary norms of Belarus.

Lin­guis­tic expert assess­ment of the arti­cle proved that author’s tone is neu­tral.

Arti­cle 52 of the Law on Mass Media direct­ly states that a jour­nal­ist “does not bear lia­bil­i­ty for dis­sem­i­na­tion of data not cor­re­spond­ing to real­i­ty, if that data are received from state bod­ies, oth­er state orga­ni­za­tions, their offi­cials, as well as are con­tained in offi­cial infor­ma­tion­al reports and/or mate­ri­als”. We draw atten­tion to the fact that the court reject­ed to include the Min­sk Cen­ter of Hygiene and Epi­demi­ol­o­gy as co-defen­dant, although this is the state orga­ni­za­tion that had pro­vid­ed the infor­ma­tion to the reporter.

We are also sur­prised by the fact that for the first time in the his­to­ry of Belarus court reject­ed to engage as code­fen­dant the mass medi­um which dis­sem­i­nat­ed the infor­ma­tion – the agency Asso­ci­at­ed Press. The out­come of the tri­al dra­mat­i­cal­ly nar­rows free expres­sion in the coun­try, as it casts doubts on the very pos­si­bil­i­ty to hold jour­nal­is­tic inves­ti­ga­tions in Belarus.”

6/10/2016 Dairy Com­pa­ny Sues AP Jour­nal­ist for Report about Radioac­tive Milk (Upd)

7/12/2016 Expert Tes­ti­fies the Radi­a­tion Tests Were Incor­rect