July 26, 1999
His Excellency Ernesto Pérez Balladares
President of Panama
Presidential Palace
Panama City, Panama
Fax: 507-227-0073
Your Excellency,
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the criminal prosecution of Orlanda Obad, a Croatian journalist with the independent political daily Jutarnji List, who was charged with violating Article 295 of the Croatian Penal Code for revealing alleged business secrets about your family’s financial holdings.
The Croatian Public Prosecutor’s office filed charges against Obad on April 22, 1999. The accusations were based on an article Obad published on October 17, 1998 in Jutarnji List, in which she reported that your wife had approximately $150,000 in a bank account at the Zagrebacka bank in Croatia. This information was excluded from an earlier earnings declaration, despite a new Croatian law (the Law on Rights and Obligations of State Employees, passed in September 1998 by the Croatian parliament) that requires public officials to release the amount of their entire family holdings .
Although the revelations in Obad’s article may have caused embarrassment to your family, information about the financial holdings of government officials and their families falls well within the category of public interest. As an international, non-governmental organization of journalists dedicated to upholding press freedom around the world, CPJ believes that no journalist should be prosecuted for publishing such information.
This is the second attempt by your government to charge journalists under Article 295. A final court hearing is expected to take place in the fall for Ratko Boskovic, a journalist with the independent weekly Globus. He has been accused of revealing the content of bank documents in a 1995 Globus article which examined possible financial improprieties of the Viktor Lenac shipyard in Rijeka. His trial is still pending.
CPJ is also very troubled by the precedent that this case sets in regard to the treatment of sources. Two employees from Zagrebacka bank in Croatia, who admitted freely to the bank that they had provided the information to Obad, were immediately fired, an act which has been severely criticized by the public and the press in Croatia. On December 3, 1998, Obad and the former bank employees were called to testify before an investigative judge regarding the case. They have since filed a complaint against the charges, but are expected to be tried in the fall. If convicted, they could all face up to five years in prison.
CPJ strongly protests against the prosecution of all these individuals for practicing their profession. We remind your excellency that Article 19 of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, to which Croatia is a signatory, grants journalists the freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
We urge you to take a leadership role in ensuring that Croatian officials cease the unjustified harassment of Obad and other individuals accused under Article 295.
Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter. We await your response.
Sincerely,
Ann K. Cooper
Executive Director
Join CPJ in Protesting Attacks on the Press in Croatia
Send a letter to:
His Excellency Ernesto Pérez Balladares
President of Panama
Presidential Palace
Panama City, Panama
Fax: 507-227-0073