Men of law discuss news of arbitration practice

The conference of scientists and media representatives "on practices of judicial sanctions on the mass media in view of nonmaterial damage to reputation" organized by RosBusinessConsulting (RBC) was held yesterday at Alexander House. According to conference participants Konstantin Sklovsky, doctor of legal sciences, and lawyer Pavel Astakhov, the practice of collecting huge amounts of money by the Moscow arbitration court from printed publications threatens many of them with bankruptcy.

The conference of scientists, press officers and journalists was conducted by editor-in-chief of the Echo of Moscow radio station, Alexey Venediktov. He announced that he was concerned about the recent decisions of the Moscow arbitration court that allowed two claims of Alfa-Bank against Moskovskaya Pravda and its journalist Konstantin Laskin worth 5.8 million rubles (about USD208 thousand), and against Kommersant publishing house worth 320.5mln rubles (about USD11.5mln). As the court ruled in both the cases, the mass media had discredited a bank of "stainless" reputation.

"Thank God, we have no case law," Venediktov observed. "Should there be the case law, Russia would have lost not only independent press, but also the governmental press before long."

First secretary of the British embassy in Moscow Alan Holmes told the audience how such conflicts were settled between the British mass media and businesses. There's a board of complaints about the press involving editors-in-chief of various periodicals and public representatives. The board is independent of the government and is guided mainly by the code of mass media conduct. It's not by operation of law that it's in existence, and, nevertheless, the mass media complies with the board's decisions (the latter are posted in full in the delinquent publication) and finance its activities.

Konstantin Sklovsky, doctor of legal sciences, author of 150 scientific works on civil law, who took the floor afterwards, admitted that the Moscow arbitration court invoked an emergency situation by imposing unduly great fines for "nonmaterial damage to reputation" on the mass media. "The capital's arbitration court is the only European court that imposes reputation damages on the mass media 'by guess-work.' This I believe is a disaster that has to be made public."

Lawyer Pavel Astakhov, who advocated famous journalists Mikhail Leontyev and Evgeny Kiselev at the suit for ORT TV Channel honor and dignity protection seconded Mr. Sklovsky: "When examining such disputes, both the arbitration courts and courts of general jurisdiction must maintain a balance between the freedom of the press and business reputation protection. As for the case of satisfying Alfa Bank's claims by the Moscow arbitration court, the judges ventured to subjectively estimate the "sufferings" of a legal entity, whereas it's a natural person only who can suffer."

Alexander Erdelevsky, legal scholar, author of the book entitled "Psychological Damage Compensation" issued in the third edition recently, acknowledged at yesterday's conference that it was impossible to fight against the practices of collection of unjustified sums of money in compensation of the reputation damage in the Russian court. He said the only way out was to appeal to the European court. Yet, as is known, only the person from whom the unfortunate reputation damages are being collected by court, in our case - the author of the material - can appeal to a European court.

It was General Director of RosBusinessConsulting Yury Rovensky, the organizer, who closed the meeting. He called upon the press to think over its own self-organization forms and hoped that the plenary meeting of Russia's Supreme Court to be summoned on December 23, 2004 in order to adopt a resolution on business reputation protection would not leave scientists' and journalists' opinion unheeded.

Ekaterina Zapodinskaya