Articles

caption: Galina Arapova

Standing up to bullies can be extremely scary, as the head of one of Russia’s rare media-freedom groups recalls.

In the 1990s, Galina Arapova successfully defended a group of TV journalists who were sued for defamation by members of a neo-Nazi group, Russian National Unity.

“Those guys threatened the journalists and me with murder,” she said. “It was a very, very unpleasant experience, to say the absolute least.”

Such threats are common – and often real - in a country where murders of journalists and human rights lawyers often go unpunished.

Russia’s media are largely owned or controlled by the Kremlin and its big-business allies, and few journalists dare to stand up to them. Those who do frequently face intimidation through the courts, where they usually lose, but the lucky few manage to enlist the help of Arapova and her small team at the Mass Media Defence Centre (MMDC) in Voronezh, an industrial town in southwestern Russia.

“Our main activity is the defence of journalists in court. It’s the most frequent method used to silence the media. Around 5,000 defamation cases are initiated against the media every year,” Arapova said.

Increasingly, her work includes challenging domestic judgments at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg - on the grounds that they violate Russia’s pledge to abide by European standards of freedom of expression.

In a recent success, the Court overturned a ruling that Viktor Chemodurov, a journalist from Kursk in southwest Russia, was guilty of defamation.

He had criticised corruption in the administration of former regional governor Aleksandr Rutskoy, a one-time vice president of Russia known for his intolerance of criticism.

Arapova’s latest Strasbourg case involves journalist and local deputy Vladimir Timakov, who faced the wrath of the Kremlin-appointed governor in Tula, 200 km from Moscow, for complaining of rampant corruption. Timakov lost two civil defamation cases – heard abnormally in closed court – and was fined 1.5 million rubles ($50,000), decisions that Arapova called “absolutely absurd”. He is also now defending a criminal libel charge over the same case and risks the confiscation of his possessions.

Despite limited resources and a stretched workload, the MMDC does work across most of Russia but still focuses on its home city of Voronezh - where Peter the Great built Russia’s first navy - some 500 km south of Moscow. Funded in part by the Media Legal Defence Initiative, MMDC now has four full-time media lawyers involved in up to 150 cases a year.

While journalists in Voronezh still face many pressures, they now know that if their work angers powerful figures they are more likely than colleagues elsewhere in Russia to have strong support that could stop the law being misused against them.

Vladimir Mazenko is the editor of a Voronezh weekly whom Arapova successfully defended after he was sued for writing about an MP who had illegally built himself a home. He praised her for being “ready to come to the aid of any journalist or publication at any minute”.

“She and the Centre staff are doing very important work for society to support the independence of journalists. This is especially important at a time when freedom of speech in Russia is in crisis,” he said.

But unsound decisions by Russian courts are not always to do with malign judges or pressure from the powerful. In a country that has undergone traumatic upheaval since the end of the Soviet system, they often stem from ignorance of new laws, especially those arising from international conventions.

Arapova puts a lot of effort into training lawyers and judges in media law and specifically on how Article 10 of the European Convention, guaranteeing freedom of expression, fits into existing law.

She said her approach is only as adversarial as necessary and that the Centre has even won the respect of local judges, and requests from courts elsewhere in Russia to come and train their staff.

But she says for all the progress, Russia will not have a free press any time soon. The country languishes near the bottom of international press freedom tables, and the murders of prominent journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova have scared many reporters away from covering anything risky such as the Chechnya conflict or official or business corruption.

“I don’t see any improvement in the media field in the near future,” Arapova said.  A few independent publications like the bold Novaya Gazeta – for whom Politkovskaya and Estemirova worked - struggle on, but most journalists work for outlets that have no intention of sticking their necks out.

“We can provide a high professional defence and everything, but we can’t change the dependence of local media on local authorities from a financial point of view,” said Arapova. “Thus there is a level of self-censorship … this is a bigger problem now in Russia.”

But Arapova’s sees progress over the longer term. In Voronezh, her Centre has won “the vast majority of our cases involving journalists and had very progressive judgments citing European Court case-law in Voronezh, which is still a dream in many other regions.”

She is now building a nation-wide network of media lawyers, the first step in exporting her successful approach to media defence to other regions in the country.

In February 2011, she was awarded a “Golden Pen” award by the Russian Union of Journalists in recognition of her unwavering defence of media freedom.

The Mass Media Defence Centre is a key partner of the Media Legal Defence Initiative