Will Mediapart
be able to publish its new investigation into the mayor of Saint-Etienne, which has been banned for 13 days?
Response Wednesday, November 30, justice to decide whether or not to cancel the unprecedented
"censorship"
denounced by the site, supported by many journalists and defenders of freedom of expression.
Last Friday, the director of the investigative media, Edwy Plenel, came to ask the Paris court
"to put an end as soon as possible to an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the press"
.
But the case was put under advisement, to the disappointment of
Mediapart
, supported at the hearing by Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), trade unions, the Human Rights League and associations of the judicial press and lawyers practicing press law.
In their sights, an order, issued urgently by the same court on November 18, at the request of the mayor of Saint-Etienne, Gaël Perdriau (ex-LR), invoking an invasion of privacy, without
Mediapart
having could defend themselves.
This decision prohibits him from publishing new information taken from an audio recording of the elected representative of Saint-Etienne, after a series of revelations on a case of blackmail with intimate video,
“under penalty of 10,000 euros per published extract”
.
“It is not for the court to pre-check information that has not been published.
»
Emmanuel Tordjman, Mediapart lawyer
However, the Mediapart
investigation
presents a
"major public interest"
, argued Edwy Plenel, relating how a mayor uses
"the poison of slander"
as
a "political weapon to discredit"
an opponent, Laurent Wauquiez, President LR of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
It was a question of
"killing in the bud"
a
"very serious slanderous rumor"
and
"without any foundation by the admission of its propagator"
, added the journalist.
Above all,
“it is not up to the court to check information that has not been published beforehand
,” insisted
Mediapart
lawyer Emmanuel Tordjman.
“It is the seriousness of your decision”
, he launched to the magistrate Violette Baty, asking her to retract the order made by her.
"Legal disaster"
,
"heresy"
... The lawyers of the various supporters of
Mediapart
castigated in turn an
"unpublished"
decision which
"pulverizes the law of the press"
in force since 1881, considering that the judge had been
"deceived »
.
"It is deeply unfair to say that our objective was to undermine freedom of expression"
, for his part defended Me Christophe Ingrain, the lawyer for Gaël Perdriau - absent at the hearing -, invoking the right to private life.
However, it is the freedom of the press that is at stake, according to a text of support for
Mediapart
signed by around thirty journalists' companies, including those of
Le Monde
, AFP,
Liberation
and BFMTV.
They are more generally concerned about the proliferation of
“gag procedures”
in France and the recent lawsuits initiated by the Altice group (SFR, BFMTV) against the information site Reflets, seen as
“a diversion”
of press law.
"Prior censorship"
Chance of the calendar, the appeal hearing on this last case is scheduled for Wednesday in Versailles at 3 p.m., time at which
Mediapart
must be fixed on the fate of its investigation.
Attacked before the commercial court for having published articles based on documents stolen by computer hackers, the Reflets site was prohibited from publishing new ones.
This
“prior censorship”
poses
“a problem for all investigative journalists, most of the documents they use not having been published or communicated by their initial owners since this poses a concern for their image”
, explains to l AFP Antoine Champagne, editor-in-chief of Reflets.
Asked by AFP, Altice, who shares the same lawyer as Gaël Perdriau, did not wish to comment.
In reaction to the procedure targeting
Mediapart
, the centrist senator Nathalie Goulet filed a bill last week guaranteeing that a publication could
"be prohibited only in application of a judicial decision rendered contradictorily"
.
But
"that does not answer the question at all"
, deplores Dominique Pradalié, the president of the IFJ, to AFP, who would prefer
"provisions making it possible to sanction much more seriously the abuses against the freedom of the press, attacked from everywhere”
.
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