A court ruling in Ecuador this week requiring the newspaper La Hora to publicly apologise to the government for an article containing “inexact” information constitutes a serious threat to press freedom and transparency ahead of the country’s February presidential vote, the International Press Institute (IPI) said today.
A decision issued by a civil judge on Monday ruled that La Hora had violated the government’s constitutional right to protection from “the dissemation of inexact or unproven information” in reporting that the administration of President Rafael Correa had spent over US $71 million on official advertising since January.
The ruling requires the publication to insert a correction of the same dimensions as the original article as well as to print an apology to the government and to the Ecuadorean public on the paper’s cover.
Francisco Vivanco, La Hora’s editor, said the verdict was less an attack on the paper than on “Ecuadorean citizens who have the right to freely receive information during the election,” according to a statement released by the press-freedom group Fundamedios, which also condemned the sentence.
The Oct. 10 article summarised the findings of a report issued by the Corporación Participación Ciudadana (PC), a Quito-based non-profit monitoring centre that was among a number of civil-society groups invited to observe the Organisation of American States (OAS) general assembly in June.
PC’s detailed figures indicated that various government institutions had spent a total of over US $9 million on advertising in the month of September alone. La Hora quoted a ruling-party legislator, Gastón Gagliardo, as insisting the high sums were necessary “given the attacks of the opposition that aim to misinform.”
IPI Press Freedom Manager Barbara Trionfi said today: “IPI strongly condemns the court’s ruling in this case, which appears to be an attempt to punish La Hora for publishing information—which was already publicly available and documented—that could cast the government in an unfavorable light.”
She continued: “IPI believes that forcing the newspaper to publish a correction and an apology on the front page severely interferes with the newspaper’s editorial independence; and that the public interest—in case the information published was actually inaccurate—could have been satisfied in less intrusive ways.”
“Statistics regarding government advertising in an election season should be easily accessible to anybody under Ecuador’s freedom of information law. The government’s apparent efforts to suppress such information sets an ominous precedent that threatens the Ecuadorean people’s right to access and distribute pertinent information related to the presidential campaign,” Trionfi added.
IPI recently condemned an $80,000 fine levied against the magazine Vistazo which had been accused of spreading political propaganda in urging its readers to reject elements of a popular referendum held in May 2011.
In the final report on its May 2012 press-freedom mission to Ecuador, IPI expressed deep reservations over recent reforms to the country’s electoral law, which include a ban on “direct or indirect promotion” of a particular candiate in the three months preceding an election. The controversial changes related to the press, the report noted, were explicitly instituted by President Correa through a procedural veto power.
