JP/3/Aji
Press must promote self-censorship: Experts
Tiarma Siboro The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Journalists must diligently adopt a self-censorship principle in the current press freedom era to put a stop to what is described as "legal violence," experts claim.
Former chairman of the Press Council, Ichlasul Amal said that this legal violence was a new form of violence against journalists as the courts now preferred to categorize press disputes as criminal cases when there are allegations of defamation, libel or spreading of hatred.
Amid the rampant corruption in the country's judicial system, there was little chance for journalists, who happened to produce incorrect or misleading information, to evade criminal proceedings, he added.
"In this current atmosphere, violence against the press is not merely in the form of physical assaults, but also in the form of legal (violence)," Ichlasul explained on Wednesday during a seminar on legal guidance for news workers.
"Journalists can prevent the so-called legal violence if they adopt self-censorship as a principle," he added.
Ichlasul made the comments following the rising number of legal attacks on the press during the current press freedom era, which was obtained after the downfall of the former authoritarian New Order regime in the late 1990s.
The seminar was sponsored by the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) in a response to the recent violence against journalists working with the Indo Pos newspaper.
The Indo Pos incident took place last week and involved dozens of people from Tanah Abang in Central Jakarta, who claimed to be followers of a gangster leader, Hercules. The group attacked journalists at the paper's editorial office in South Jakarta, and assaulted two reporters because they were upset over an article about the gangs in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta.
The gang members said the reporter had not interviewed them for the article, which was about the changes in the Tanah Abang underworld, whereby a new generation of thugs had taken over the area from Hercules. He and his gang of attackers have been arrested by the police.
It was yet another in a long line of such attacks by mobs in this country. In late 1990, a Yogyakarta journalist, Udin, was killed after suffering serious injuries to his head after unidentified men attacked him. Udin was at the time running a series on a corruption case which implicated top officials from Bantul regency.
During the seminar, AJI also promoted its "guide book" for journalists to keep them from getting into legal trouble. According to the book, professional journalists can be excluded as witnesses because the profession grants them rights to protect their sources. Journalists are also free to appoint lawyers that they trust to defend them in a legal battle, and are not advised to merely accept their offices' policies on legal representation due to possible politicking.
Margiono, coordinator of AJI's legal department, said that defamation and libel charges against the press should be scrapped from the judicial system.
He said that the court should instead adopt the civil lawsuit mechanism in settling press disputes,
As long ago as 1976, the Swedish government scrapped defamation charges against the press. Several African countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya, as well as several Asian countries, such as Sri Lanka, North Korea and Japan, as well as Argentina, have also scrapped defamation charges from their criminal justice system.