Last year, according to the respected Reporters Without Borders index on press freedom in 180 countries, Russia ranked in 148th place. That put it well behind not just the nations of Europe, but also countries such as Pakistan, Malaysia, and Afghanistan. Recently, Russian Life sat down with the founder and director of Russia’s only media rights center, Galina Arapova, to discuss the state of the press in Russia today.
The Mass Media Defense Center is located in Voronezh, not Moscow. And there are no analogous nonprofits elsewhere in the country. What makes you different and what have you achieved?
In the majority of cases we provide free legal help to journalists. And only if the editorial board of a media outlet is willing and able do we accept payment as humanitarian support for our work more generally.
What, in the larger sense, have we achieved? A small, regional organization has grown into a Russia-wide one. It is very unfortunate, I must say, that we are truly the only one remaining on the scene and offering legal assistance to journalists, photographers and bloggers on a daily basis. The entire network of similarly configured regional organizations – created in 1996 on the initiative of the Glasnost Defense Foundation to monitor violations of journalists’ rights in our country – have all closed; they have not been working for several years. It is difficult to say what caused this, aside from the eternal problem with financing, which poisons the existence of any nonprofit organization. Perhaps for us, since it was our only workplace, we devoted all our time to developing the organization, and for our colleagues in other regions they combined this work with other things. Nonetheless, to this day they are all still journalists or attorneys, and we keep in touch.
Is there really no other organization, besides yours, that offers legal aid to journalists in Russia?
Recently, general practice attorneys have started to express interest in defending journalists in our country. They take on the high profile cases, those with more media resonance, because this gives them a chance to develop professionally. Yet those occupied exclusively with aid to journalists are indeed few...
Thankfully, attorneys and nonprofits are giving more and more attention to issues of free speech, because the need for legal help in this sphere is only growing. But, truth be told, we don’t have enough people. And there has been simply a barrage of cases recently. Yet in our country, just as attorneys previously were not educated in media law, so it remains to this day; similarly, they do not teach international law well, in particular how to submit applications to the European Court of Human Rights. So we have to teach attorneys “from zero”: we select intelligent people who share our ideas and teach them to work in our “field.”
Tell me how the work of the Center began?
In 1996 we began with a single attorney – me. Now there are six in Voronezh, and one in Moscow, who work in our legal service. More importantly, we have created an informal network of media-attorneys who collaborate with us from time to time – some 25 people across the country. They work either as attorneys or as in-house counsel at media companies. We draw them in when there is a problem that is close to them, geographically speaking. But sometimes we ourselves will fly in: it happens that the local attorney cannot help, or is afraid to, or simply is not able. And the destination could be practically anywhere in the country: Makhachkala, Rostov, Syktyvkar, Moscow...
Without exaggeration, one could call your Center an emergency room for journalists, photo correspondents and bloggers, no?
That would be a correct assessment. We track legal developments regarding the sphere of mass information, the activity of journalists in Russia, and give them legal advice, defending correspondents in court. In general, over 20 years the specialists in our Mass Media Defense Center (MMDC) have earned their stripes.
Since we specialize in this area of the law, we can quickly answer any question journalists may have, which is different from our colleagues who are in a more general practice. On average, the Center handles up to 50 consultations per day, including long-distance consultations with attorneys and jurists from other regions of the country...
We help journalists make their texts “safe,” so that society receives the information it needs, and so that the journalist does not end up in court – this is the task of those who work at the Center. And, if courts cannot be avoided, then our task is to make the journalist certain that she can defend her right to write about what she planned to write about.
Who, as a rule, turns to you for aid?
If a correspondent writes on cultural themes, then he needs our help only rarely, because he should understand the topic and write about it in beautiful literary language, no? Most often, our “client” is a reporter or investigative journalist, someone working with a huge quantity of documents, people, and evidence, focusing on issues of public concern. In this instance, quite often questions arise about the confidentiality of information sources, about working with complex documents, or about protecting journalists and media outlets from administrative pressure and intimidation.
I spoke with Kursk journalist Victor Chemodurov, whom the Center successfully defended in a case of free speech before the European Court of Human Rights. “The work and friendship of the Center taught me something very important,” he said. “No one is rushing to extend to journalists even those rights that are guaranteed by law; they must be taken! And how one does this properly is the advice they give you at the Center... which I consider the pride of Russia, but which is for now undervalued, or valued upside-down.” What do you think Chemodurov meant by “the pride of Russia valued upside-down”?
He is talking about the “foreign agent” status that the Center has been coping with since February 2015, when employees of the Ministry of Justice showed up for an unplanned inspection. Based on their evaluation, our organization was labeled a “foreign agent” [a designation give any Russian NGO that receives donations or funding from abroad]. A direct confrontation arose: human rights defenders versus the government; court, appeal, two higher appeals, and then the European Court. It should be noted that even the government of Voronezh oblast was perplexed: it was both strange and incorrect to accuse us of working in the service of some foreign power, as our main aim is to support freedom of expression in this country and to help Russian media fulfill its mission.
Recently, given our designation as a “foreign agent,” we have been completely barred from working with lawmakers, because that is the very definition of political activity. Previously we were invited to various roundtables, asked to give our analysis of this or that process, or to express our opinion in regard to developing case law – as working attorneys with considerable experience. After all, we work “in the field” every day, and we know the problems that exist in enforcement first-hand, not from hearsay.
It would not seem possible to earn a living defending human rights, as you are not a typical law office that pulls down huge fees for its legal work. So how do you finance your activity?
The channels that remain open are those traditionally employed by nonprofit organizations: charitable donations from the various sorts of funds that ought to exist in large numbers in the country, to whom it should be possible to apply through a grant-making system.
You know, over the twenty years of our existence, no one put any pressure on us based on where we sought out money, from whom and what we did with it. But now all human rights defenders who have received even a kopek of foreign money have been added to the list of “foreign agents.”
Our government has exorcised all foreign funds [from the country]. Yet in the early 1990s, you may recall, there was a list of 127 foreign funds whose donations aimed at defending human rights and other charitable goals were tax-free. In the mid-2000s, changes were made to the Russian Federation tax code, and the list shrunk from 127 to 12.
What is the most “popular” category of cases at the Center?
Defamation cases against journalists. And in fact we have a very high rate of success in such cases. If, from the start, a journalist made a fatal mistake, for example he has no proof or, let’s say, he relied on an information source and that source feared going to court with him, then we cannot prove the reliability of the information disseminated. If it is the other way around, then our success rate on the national level is around 97 percent.
If we do not win a case, but it involves a strategically significant legal question that can influence court practice, then we will submit an application to the European Court of Human Rights. And I should remind your readers that winning a defamation case is not just about fully countering the [plaintiff’s] claim, but also about ensuring that neither the journalist nor the publication suffer financially, and that the journalist’s right to freedom of expression is properly counterbalanced by the plaintiff’s right to preserve his or her reputation. Even in cases where we lose, we seek to minimize the defendant’s potential losses.
In your opinion, could one call today’s Russian courts independent?
We observe a curious tendency: that which could be easily proven ten years ago has become increasingly difficult. Thus, the courts in our country can hardly be called independent. Judicial cases often end in a political compromise, particularly if the plaintiff is a highly placed official, or if the media outlet is oppositional and raising controversial issues.
One merely needs to recall the case of the Belgorod blogger Sergei Lezhnev, whom we defended. I remember how the scales were clearly tipped in our direction, but opposing us was the institute headed by a rector who was also the local parliamentary speaker. The “merrymaking” began: they started by adding new witnesses and the plaintiff did not show up in court. And it was clear that this was happening in concert with the plaintiff, because the judge has a right to dismiss a case without deliberation in the event of three non-appearances by the plaintiff. And all of this despite the fact that the case had been fully reviewed several months previous, and all that remained was to deliver the verdict, which was clearly expected to be in our favor. I cite this example to show that the judge, unfortunately, was afraid of handing down an honest, principled decision. We never saw this sort of thing previously.
The situation with free speech has certainly worsened in the past decade. What do you see to be the root causes of this?
There has been an increase in restrictions based on what are now considered “abuses of the freedom of mass communication” by mass media. For example, one cannot write about narcotics, about children who are victims of crime, about suicide or methods of suicide, about mass demonstrations not sanctioned by the government. There are also changes relating to limitations on the percent of foreign ownership of media. All of these innovations toughen the law, and at the same time they toughen up the control over compliance, as well as the sanctions resulting from a violation.
There is a law, “On Information, Information Technology, and the Defense of Information,’” [27 July 2006] that is constantly being amended. A law was adopted “On the Defense of Children from Information, Damaging their Health and Development” [29 December 2010], as a result of which a large number of media outlets are required to publish an age grading of 18+, 16+, or 12+, and it is not clear to editors what the difference is between these.
When these requirements were introduced, workers at Kommersant did not understand why they had to put 18+ on their newspaper, showing thereby that they were a publication for a “mature audience,” which is something that many might associate with trivial or erotic publications, even though children themselves have little interest in reading about the sort of things that journalists in a serious business publication write about – say about economics.
One way or another, websites marked with 18+ will be blocked by special filtering systems set up in all educational institutions – simply put, they will be inaccessible. In other words, the audience is being restricted. All internet providers will have to set up analogous filtration systems. For example, at McDonalds (as at many other public wifi spots) one may have difficulty reading information on sites designated as 18+, because children frequent this restaurant. Restrictions have also affected the dissemination of information about suicide.
There is scarcely a journalist in the country who is unfamiliar with the concept of “self-censorship,” or who has not been affected by it. What do you see as the effect of this phenomenon?
Self-censorship is psychologically very exhausting, and journalists impacted by endless restrictions begin to lose faith in their professional mission. We try to motivate them.
Often their place is taken up by bloggers, who assume the function of defenders of the public interest – what in international experience is called “a watchdog role.” This role, which should traditionally be filled by the press, is now in our country, in part, fulfilled by citizen activists and bloggers. In my opinion, they are also exerting their right to express their opinions, and their work today is no less, and perhaps, especially now, even more important than that of journalists.
Have you, personally, been subjected to threats?
Unfortunately, yes. Way back in 1998, the organization Russian National Unity (RNU), which was later banned for extremism, sued a local television company just outside Voronezh. In its reporting on an RNU march, the journalists edited in segments from the film Common Fascism, where the voiceover was saying “We have seen this somewhere before. We have definitely seen this.”
It was our first victory in Russia, the case against RNU, when they, as in other cases across the country, disputed journalistic comparisons of their ideology with fascism. Since our victory crushed their entire PR campaign and their campaign to intimidate journalists, they started to threaten me and the journalists. Two cases were opened into death threats made against me by RNU activists, as I had defended the journalists in court, but both ended without result...
The goal of the threats was to intimidate. Nonetheless, often threats lead to actions and one cannot underestimate them. There were situations when journalists were murdered after they were threatened: Akhmednabi Akhmednabiev, Anna Politikovskaya, Natalya Estemirova, Igor Domnikov. We know that they turned to the police, but the police did nothing, saying it was simply threats, that there was nothing serious (i.e. there was no corpse).
The case of the murdered human rights defender Stanlislav Markelov, who fought for the rights of journalists, was solved. But, generally, as a rule such cases are not solved. On that note, some 350 journalists have been murdered in Russia, but only 39 have ended in sentences against the perpetrators; those who order these crimes have, in the majority of cases, remained behind the scenes.
“On the one hand, I can say much about the Mass Media Defense Center (MMDC), but on the other hand, I have nothing special to say. There is an excellent expression: ‘God works through people.’ And if journalists have guardian angels on Earth, then they are at the MMDC. Anyone who has had occasion to acquaint themselves with their mission, would agree with me. And it is truly a mission, and not simply work... It is a heavy cross to bear in defense of the rights of journalists and Russian media as a whole. And it must be borne, no matter what, through it all. Russian rulers seek to keep the people in silence and darkness. These rulers have always seen an educated, thinking, and concerned society to be a threat to their power. What can I say? If we had had more such human rights defenders, we would now be living in a different Russia.”
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