France: : Infiltration and concealed camera methods do not exclude good faith

• Autores: Amélie Blocman
• Localización: IRIS: Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory, ISSN-e 1023-8565, Nº. 10, 2014, págs. 15-16
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • In a judgment delivered on 16 October 2014, the Regional Court of Paris has defined the conditions under which journalists prosecuted for defamation following a concealed-camera report may claim that they acted in good faith, thereby escaping prosecution. Associations responsible for the management of a parish and a school and their representatives, were suing the publication director of a television channel, a number of journalists, and the manager of the production company of the �Les Infiltrés� programme for defamation following the broadcast of a report (followed by a pre-recorded studio debate), entitled �A l�extrême droite du Père� (on the extreme right hand of the Father). The report had been produced using the infiltration method, which enabled a journalist to infiltrate a small extreme right-wing group presented as being extremely violent and racist in a parish, in a school, and to film various people using a concealed camera, as well as applying certain blurring and voice-distortion techniques prior to broadcasting. The report claimed that the Roman Catholic associations and the person in charge of them had links with this small group and with the school, which was qualified as a �nest of Fascists�, backed by various elements and examples given in the report. It was also claimed that the school�s teaching was �overtly anti-Semitic� and even revisionist. The court found that all the utterances at issue were defamatory with regard to the parish, the school, and its manager, who was shown un-blurred in the broadcast and was wrongly presented as the founder of the school, whereas he is in fact chairman of the association which manages the school.