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Panama News Briefs

Penal reform commission wants new anti-press laws
by Eric Jackson, in part from other media

The 11-member presidential commission appointed to recommend changes in Panama's Penal Code has issued its report, which covers many aspects of the law. The one that has garnered the most attention so far, however, is a new crime that would apply only to journalists.

Under the proposal, any journalist who disseminates a story that reflects badly upon the honor of any individual, corporation or institution --- even if the story is absolutely true --- could be imprisoned for "injuria" if a judge agreed that an unspecified standard of verification had not been used. Essentially it's a move by corrupt politicians and sharp-dealing business interests to suppress all investigative journalism in Panama.

The proposed changes to the criminal defamation laws also provide for longer prison terms for libel and slander than the current two-year maximums and would allow courts to sentence journalists to spend their weekends in jail.

Law professor and journalist Miguel Antonio Bernal, in an open letter to the OAS, charged that the purposes of this proposal at this time include the intimidation of the press into self-censorship and the stifling of a real debate leading up to the Panama Canal expansion referendum.

But José Juan Ceballos, one of the 11 lawyers on the commission, puts it a different way. "If the ethical faults of lawyers are sanctioned," he told La Prensa, "the bad practices of journalists should also be sanctioned." (Bernal is the president of the Colegio de Abogados Honor Tribunal, or our national bar association's disciplinary board that deals with complaints of illegal or unethical conduct by attorneys.) Ceballlos added that public officials should have no less protection of their honor than private citizens.

The proposal has drawn blasts from human rights, journalism and anti-corruption groups. The OAS Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Ignacio Álvarez, issued a statement from Washington calling it "a step backwards for the right to freedom of expression." Both Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez and "anti-corruption czarina" Alma Montenegro de Fletcher criticized the proposal in La Prensa.

Although President Torrijos and his political allies have sometimes been criticized for various tactics to manage access to information, the current government's record on freedom of the press issues is markedly more tolerant than that of the Moscoso administration it replaced and marginally better than that of the 1994-1999 Pérez Balladares administration.

It is unlikely that the Penal Code will come before the National Assembly during the current legislative session, but the legislators are nearly unanimously pro-corruption and anti-reporting about corruption and would likely embrace the proposal. There are, however, some reasons to doubt that this president's cabinet would submit the Penal Code changes to the legislature with these anti-press provisions in it, or that if the deputies passed such changes to our defamation laws that Torrijos would sign the measure.