ANP: Within 48 hours, Peru Libre introduced two bills aimed at coercing journalists and the media.

President of the Association of Journalists of Peru (ANP), Zuliana Lines, noted that in just 48 hours the Peru Libre parliamentarian, Second Montalvopresented two bills related to media work.

The first establishes the obligation of public and private media to broadcast for 20 minutes a year the managerial achievements of the central government, regional and municipal authorities. Second, the penalty with 4 years in prison for those citizens who are convicted of libel.

They are trying to intimidate journalists

Laines believed that the purpose of these parliamentary initiatives was to force press and that the defamation project seeks to intimidate to journalists.

“From National Association of Journalists (ANP)we have qualified the account (…) as excessive, inhibitory D despite to freedom of speech, because it is a matter of transforming efficient prison which could lead to a libel conviction,” he said.

In this sense, he believed that the defamation complaint was in fact a pretext for stopping investigative journalism.

“We from the ANP pointed out that this is a strategy that many authorities or people who perform public functions, unfortunately, used to intimidate or want to distort the investigations disclosed by journalists,” he stressed.

As the ANP President explained, over the past 5 years over 150 arbitrary complaints for slandering journalists throughout the country.

“Raising the likelihood of a defamation sentence to an effective prison term will stifle a significant portion of journalistic exposure because risk of imprisonment”, he pointed out.

For Linez, the punishment for defamation may seem fair, butin a justice system that is really does not weighactually, what is the right to information and the right to honor and good reputation”, there is a risk that the judge “will be sentencing any citizen.

“This draft law completely contradicts what the international legal doctrine notes today (…) In other countries, what is being done is decriminalize crimes against honor, that is, they are derived from the criminal code (…), as a result of which they are dealt with mainly through administrative channels. (…) And we, in the country, on the initiative of the congressman “Free Peru” Segundo Montalvo (…) are conceived just the opposite. These crimes are not only not excluded from the Criminal Code, but are also intended to aggravate effective prison terms,” ​​he explained.