Journalists are pillars of our democracies, and many of them are performing their duties in difficult, if not dangerous conditions. It takes courage to be a journalist. You can be hurt. You can be sued.
But it takes money to go to court. This is why I admire the Media Legal Defence Initiative’s commitment to providing legal help for journalists, bloggers, and independent media all around the world, as legal costs should not be a worry for journalists and citizen journalists, alike on trial for doing their jobs. MLDI fulfills this mission by providing journalists access to pro bono attorneys, by paying their legal fees if necessary, and by helping building stronger cases by filing amici curia briefs.
One of these cases is Butkevich v. Russia, which is currently pending at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Applicant Maksim Butkevich, a Ukrainian journalist, was covering a protest which took place during the 2006 G8 Summit in St Petersburg. Applicant claims that he was arrested by the Russian police while taking pictures, even though he had complied with the order to stop taking photographs and even though he showed his press-card to the police. He was convicted of having participated in an unauthorized march and sentenced to two days of detention which he served.
Mr. Butkevich is asking the court to rule that his arrest was unlawful, that he did not receive a fair trial, and that his freedom of expression as protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights has been violated.
MLDI has filed their comments on this case with the European Court of Human Rights, jointly with Mass Media Defence Centre and ARTICLE 19.
I had the pleasure to be able to provide MLDI, pro bono, some input about how French press law deals with journalists working on protests.
See MLDI press release here.
Image is courtesy of Flickr user Pierre-Selim under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.
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