(Periodistas/IFEX) – On 13 August 1999, the minister of the National Supreme Court, Adolfo Vázquez, threatened to take a constitutional lawyer to court because of the lawyer’s criticisms of a decision made by the court and of the minister’s negative comments on the press. **Updates IFEX alert of 13 August 1999** On Wednesday 11 August, […]
(Periodistas/IFEX) – On 13 August 1999, the minister of the National Supreme
Court, Adolfo Vázquez, threatened to take a constitutional lawyer to court
because of the lawyer’s criticisms of a decision made by the court and of
the minister’s negative comments on the press.
**Updates IFEX alert of 13 August 1999**
On Wednesday 11 August, the court decided to revoke Horacio Verbitsky’s
acquittal in a case filed against him by President Carlos Menem (see IFEX
alerts). Constitutional lawyer Daniel Sabsay was interviewed about the
ruling by journalist Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú on her radio programme. Sabsay
criticised the court’s views on journalism and noted that some time ago, one
of the court’s members, Judge Vázquez, had said that “journalists are going
to be taught a lesson” and that he was “capable of confronting them.”
In a 13 August letter to Sabsay, Vázquez demanded that Sabsay rectify his
allegation that these “false statements” had been made by Vázquez, or,
alternatively, if he insisted that he was correct, that he “define what
exactly was said and where.”
The statements Sabsay referred to were published on 19 December 1998 in the
“Clarín” daily, after Vázquez made a presentation at a Freedom of Expression
conference in Tucumán. During the conference, Vázquez stated that “in
Argentina, journalists’ credibility is falling, because of the traps into
which some of their information falls.” He added that the court had shown
courage by ruling against journalists in a number of cases and thus
confronting “a wave of false and wrongful freedom of the press.”
“I did nothing more than express, less emphatically, what he had already
said,” Sabsay maintained, suggesting that he was not considering correcting
the comments he made about Vázquez.
