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Panama News Briefs

Penal Code revision unlikely to decriminalize libel and slander

A new court-packing scheme begins to take shape
by Eric Jackson, from other media

The Inter-American Press Association has been in town lately, hosting a series of events oriented to the corporate mainstream media and addressing certain questions about freedom of the press in Panama. Front and center were this country's calumnia e injuria (criminal defamation) laws, which are much less used during the Torrijos administration than they were under the Moscoso and Pérez Balladares governments. The present administration's information control games, the news blackouts imposed by the managements of corporate media aligned with political parties and powerful families, the effects on news coverage of the advertising cartel founded by the president's father-in-law and the concentration of broadcasting into ever fewer --- mostly PRD --- hands were not part of the discussion, however. To the corporate mainstream it was a big news event, but to The Panama News it was little more than an upscale advertising industry convention.

However, in all the hooplah hopes were raised that Panama's criminal defamation laws would be eliminated in the revision of the Penal Code, upon which an advisory committee has been working for several months, to the point of near completion. But alas, the latest news reports are the decriminalization of libel, slander, satire and truthful but unflattering coverage of the rich and powerful won't be part of the draft sent to the cabinet and the legislature.

Panama's calumnia e injuria law is actually more than one law. Calumnia is a falsehood, while injuria is the publication of something injurious to a person's reputation.

Jean Marcel Chéry, then a reporter for El Panama America but now working for La Prensa, found himself convicted of injuria but not calumnia during the Moscoso administration. He reported truthfully about a rural road built to service the farms of two top Moscoso administration figures and hardly anybody else, and the justice minister at the time, Winston Spadafora, charged calumnia e injuria. By the time the matter got to trial Spadafora was on the Supreme Court, and although Chéry's lawyers demonstrated the truth of the report, the judge was vulnerable to disciplinary reprisals from the Supreme Court and thus handed down a conviction and prison sentence for injuria alone, because his boss's reputation was harmed by the reporting of unseemly truths about him.

In another high-profile criminal defamation case, satirist Ubaldino Davis was convicted for a La Cascara News cover that made fun of the relationship between Mireya Moscoso and Winston Spadafora, who were dating at the time. It was held by the courts that in Panama all satire is criminal, because it's not strictly truthful and it ridicules people.

Eventually Chéry, Davis, this reporter and dozens of other journalists were pardoned by Mireya on her way out. (In the case against this reporter and journalist Okke Ornstein, our accuser not only didn't prevail in his case, but he's now serving a long prison term in the United States because in fact he was a swindler as we reported him to be.) But the law under which we were harassed remains on the books and the politicians by and large like it.

Meanwhile, public attention having been distracted by a side show about calumnia e injuria laws, it seems that the Penal Code revision commission is going to recommend a few significant changes to the criminal law and a major political shift.

It seems that the maximum prison term for murder, and maybe for a few other offenses, may be raised from 20 to 30 years. Sentences for some nonviolent sex offenses may be reduced. There may be some changes in criminal procedure.

But the big thing that the commission is set to recommend, according to declarations at a press conference held at the Colegio de Abogados building, is the creation of a fifth Supreme Court bench to hear cases concerning fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. That would, of course, mean the expansion of the high court to 12 magistrates by the addition of three new ones, and mean that half of the court's members, rather than the current one-third, would be Martín Torrijos appointees.

Considering that the current president came to office with five of nine magistrates appointed by his predecessor and their terms all set to expire after the end of the president's time in power, and it would seem to be a major power shift. That, however, presumes that there is some sort of difference between the behaviors of the judicial appointees of PRD and Arnulfista presidents. The evidence for that proposition is scant, but then we haven't seen enough of the Torrijos appointees' work to reasonably characterize it.

By and large anti-corruption activists would prefer that the court's composition be changed by other means, most particularly by the impeachment of several magistrates for apparent acts of corruption or by the disqualification of magistrates Winston Spadafora and Alberto Cigarruista due to an apparently corrupted process by which their nominations were approved. However, the National Assembly has left it clear that it will not use its power to confront judicial corruption in these ways.

Magaly Castillo, the executive secretary of the Citizens' Alliance for Justice, stated her concern in El Panama America: "If the selection process continues to be political, of course that creates a certain lack of confidence."

President Torrijos's Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) holds an absolute majority in the National Assembly and so far its discipline has been solid. The president appointed the commission that has recommended the court packing scheme. It is thus quite likely that this time next year there will be a 12-member Supreme Court, but what this would mean in practice is less predictable.