French law threatens "citizen journalists" and bloggers
CeBIT - News Display (heise online, 08.03.2007 17:01)
The law scrutinized by the Constitutional Council makes a "dangerous distinction" between professional journalists and ordinary citizens, the human rights organization Reporters Without Borders says.
In France the Constitutional Council has approved a new 
The rationale for introducing this passage advanced in the course of the legislative process was the desire to create a legal handle for prosecuting people who commit violence against other people, record their heinous acts and disseminate the videos made ( happy slapping ). Reporters Without Borders criticize that the law in its present form is too far-reaching and could prevent crimes from being solved.
Anyone who with whatever technical means records video images of acts of violence (including torture and barbarous acts) renders himself/herself liable to prosecution, at least as an accomplice. Be that as it may, the provisions also cover attacks and acts of violence "carried out by an official of the state in the course of his or her exercising the duties of his/her office". That is indeed way beyond happy slapping. Anyone who distributes videos of this kind can be sentenced to up to five years in prison and fined 75,000 euros. The law specifies that the ban "is not applicable when the recording or dissemination is the result of the normal exercise of a profession whose purpose is to inform the public or if it is carried out with the aim of serving as judicial evidence," the English-language statement of the organization reads.
This leaves something of a backdoor open to "citizen journalists;" for Reporters Without Borders, however, the wording of the law is much too vague. The organization points out that more and more people post reports on the Internet that include videos they themselves have made, with mobile phone cameras or camcorders, of events they happen to have witnessed. It was important to keep an eye on the behavior of authorities anywhere in the world, the organization states. "In Egypt, for example, bloggers recently revealed a series of scandals involving the security services and showed, by means of video recordings made clandestinely in detention centers, that torture is still regularly practiced in Egypt," it says in the English-language version of the organization's statement.
In the field of human rights it was the reports by "citizen journalists" and not those by professional journalists that were considered more reliable and important, Reporters Without Borders asserted. "Reporters Without Borders thinks it would be shocking if this kind of activity, which constitutes a safeguard against abuses of authority, were to be criminalized in a democratic country," the organization writes. For the professional French media none of this is an issue so far.
On the topic see also the Telepolis article:
* J'accuse ohne Beweisfoto [J'accuse without visual evidence]
(Robert W. Smith)
