Prague, April 19 (CTK) – A draft amendment to the Penal Law, which Prague plans to pass in order to meet EU requirements, extends the criteria of inadmissible and punishable defamation also to apply to social classes and people’s sexual orientation, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes on Tuesday.
The present law makes the defamation over a person’s nationality, ethnicity or language punishable. The amended law will newly ban the defamation of other groups of people, the daily writes.
“Defamation means any purposeful denigration. It may appear in any form, including a vulgar verbal lash-out,” Jiri Herzog, lawyer from Charles University’s Faculty of Law, is quoted as saying.
The bill “enhances the legal protection of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people (LGBT) against displays of hatred and violence,” the Justice Ministry writes in a report highlighting the bill, LN writes.
Klara Kalibova, from the In Iustitia group that deals with hatred violence, said the new bill, which In Iustitia helped draft, makes statements such as “Homosexuals are deviants” punishable.
As far as social classes are concerned, each class is defined by the income, life style and education of its members, the ministry writes in the report.
“During the economic crisis, the society got polarised according to the economic impact the crisis had on particular groups of people. In the meantime, the classes have developed into [groups representing] certain cultural elites and common people, respectively,” sociologist Daniel Prokop told LN.
In Iustitia wants the planned law also to protect seniors and mentally disabled people, as is usual in some Western countries.
Experts say the question is how the new law will succeed in practice.
Prague Municipal Court chairman Libor Vavra said he would prefer the definition of the relevant offences to remain as general as possible, since [the proposed] detailed definitions enable people such as extremists to abuse the situations on the verge of punishability.
A general definition makes the gathered evidence against suspects more effective, Vavra said.
The law enforcement bodies, however, have problem punishing such suspects now, the paper writes.
“The police mostly investigate such cases as a simple breach of the peace, in order to prosecute them somehow. It is hard to prove hatred as the [suspects’] motivation,” Kalibova said.
The situation is easier for the police if a defaming statement is sprayed, she said.
Like Vavra, political scientist Zdenek Zboril said he would not extend the present law’s range of effect either. When working as an expert witness for 15 years in the past, Zboril experienced only three cases of the court punishing people based on the law on the defamation of people. It did so because the three suspects had swastikas tattooed on their chests.
“On other occasions, the courts were unable to prove the crime and shunned the law in question,” Zboril said.
Another problem is that most of those who fell victims to crime due to their sexual orientation fear to turn to the police. They do not believe the police would support them, Kalibova told the paper.
In addition, hatred attacks on homosexuals are often waged by their relatives, colleagues or classmates, which makes the victims fear vengeance in case they reported the mistreatment, LN writes.
