Tightening is canceled – Kommersant

The Duma this week plans to reject a bill to tighten the liability of journalists for quoting false information. Two years ago, Vladimir Putin vetoed a law that had already been passed – this is the fourth time since 2002 that the president has used veto power in the legislative process. The expert believes that legislators have now convinced themselves that the application of existing standards did not lead to the risks that they wanted to eliminate.

In June 2020, at the height of the pandemic and against the backdrop of controversy about quarantines, vaccines and masks, the bill was introduced into the Duma (of the previous, seventh convocation) by United Russia members Sergei Boyarsky and Evgeniy Revenko. Amendments to the laws on the media and on the protection of children from harmful information initially concerned the labeling of announcements of entertainment events. But for the second reading, the same authors prepared amendments to tighten the responsibility of journalists for quoting false information. Under current law, journalists cannot be punished for spreading false information if it is an accurate quote from the media that can be identified and held accountable. The authors of the initiative proposed to exempt journalists from liability for quoting only those media outlets in which “the editor-in-chief can be identified and held accountable.” In June 2021, Vladimir Putin vetoed the adopted law. As presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov explained then, the head of state had questions about parts of the law “where we are talking about exemption from liability.”

According to Duma regulations, if the president vetoes the bill, it is transferred to the responsible committee. The committee spends ten days studying the reasons for the head of state’s decision, and then invites the chamber to either remove the document from further consideration, or create a special commission to further work on it, or approve the bill in its original wording. The commission is created at the proposal of the president or with his consent. According to Art. 107 of the Constitution, if the president used the right of veto, but the State Duma and the Federation Council, upon re-examination, approved the bill with a majority of 2/3 votes, the head of state is obliged to sign it.

Deputies plan to consider the bill rejected by the president on Thursday, November 16, as follows from the agenda of the Duma Council (it will be held on Monday). The relevant committee on information policy proposed to agree with the president’s decision and withdraw the bill from further consideration. Let us note that the committee’s draft decision was posted in the Duma database only on November 8 this year. The authors of the initiative were unavailable for comments at the time of submission of the material.

“The bill, apparently, was conceived by the deputies as tightening the responsibility of the media in terms of non-dissemination of prohibited information. That is, the very right to make a mistake was excluded,” believes Pavel Sklyanchuk, a member of the Russian Association of Public Relations. “It is not known exactly why the veto was imposed. Apparently, the legal hypothesis prevailed that law-abiding media are already careful about spreading fake news. It most likely took two years to test this theory in practice – as a result, the application of existing standards did not lead to the excesses and risks that the deputies wanted to eliminate. Thus, the president’s veto turned out to be far-sighted and the State Duma has no choice but to reject the bill. Moreover, in the conditions of the information war with the West, the amendments could do more harm than good.”

Let us recall that in 2002, Vladimir Putin vetoed another law regulating the work of the media and adopted after the terrorist attack at the Dubrovka Theater Center. It prohibited the media from publishing information that could be used by terrorists, including details of the counter-terrorist operation or information about weapons manufacturing technologies. True, the “weapons” ban was nevertheless introduced into legislation in 2021. Mr. Putin also vetoed the 2012 laws on expanding the powers of the Skolkovo innovation center (the president was not satisfied that the document did not define criteria for assessing effectiveness) and the 2016 laws on the creation of federal and regional information systems “Study Contingent” (he was criticized by parent communities) .

Ksenia Veretennikova