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Dismiss cyber libel case vs Maria Ressa, Rappler – Te, FLAG

Te says the Supreme Court finalized the Cybercrime Law only on April 22, 2014, which means that in February 2014 when the article was supposedly republished, there was no applicable law

Lian Buan
February 26, 2019
 

CYBER LIBEL. Rappler CEO Maria Ressa speaks to the media. File photo by Martin San Diego/Rappler

MANILA, Philippines – Human rights lawyer and former Supreme Court (SC) spokesman Theodore Te, along with lawyers of the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), filed a Motion to Quash before the Manila Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 46 on Tuesday, February 26, seeking a dismissal of the cyber libel case against Rappler, CEO Maria Ressa, and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr.

Te, who is now handling the cyber libel case, will take on the Department of Justice (DOJ) in its charge against the news company.

The article in question, written by Santos, was published in May 2012 or 4 months before the cybercrime law was enacted in September 2012. However, because of a typographical error ("evasion" was misspelled as "evation"), a correction was made on February 19, 2014. The updated article in 2014, according to the DOJ, is covered by the republication rule – meaning, the cybercrime law had already taken effect and was applicable.

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The DOJ used an SC decision from 1988 where the High Court had to rule which lower court has jurisdiction over a newspaper article, and in so doing, adopted the multiple publication rule.

Te, however, noted that the said decision came from the SC Third Division and not the en banc.

“It is a Third Division decision that binds only the parties thereto. It is canonical that only decisions of the Supreme Court En Banc are vested with authoritativeness or precedential character,” the motion said.

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The motion also argued that the typographical corrections did not constitute republication, based on several decisions from the United States, one of which said: “to treat the changes as republications would be inappropriate and defeat the beneficial purposes of the single publication rule.”

In Atkinson v. McLaughlin, for example, the District Court of North Dakota employed the "test of substantial modification" in the context of republication. Quoting from the ruling, the motion said: "However, even under the single publication rule, the courts have recognized that a website may be republished and create a new cause of action for defamation if the website is substantially modified. Republication triggers the start of a new statute of limitations and occurs upon a separate aggregate publication from the original, on a different occasion, which is not merely a delayed circulation of the original edition...”

“In the absence of controlling Philippine jurisprudence, American case law is persuasive and provides guidance for this court in addressing this specific issue of first impression,” said the motion.

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The DOJ dismissed complaints against other editors and directors of Rappler and proceeded to charge only Ressa, who was not involved in the editing or handling of Santos’ article.

“The dismissal of the complaint as against all corporate officers, except accused Ressa, is telling,” said the motion.

Ressa and Santos are scheduled to be arraigned on March 1.

In charging Rappler, the DOJ’s interpretation of the cybercrime law has now made it possible for online publications to be sued within 12 years of a story's publication. The ordinary libel charge under the Revised Penal Code prescribes in one year and not 12.

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THOUGHT LEADERS
[OPINION | NEWSPOINT]

The ambush of Maria Ressa

Show her up to be vulnerable, subdue her, and a chill probably goes around enough to help ease the way for the authoritarian rule he has been itching to impose. Well, knowing Maria Ressa, she’s not one easily subdued.

Vergel O. Santos
February 16, 2019
             
The arrest of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa was very much in keeping with the high-handed ways of the Duterte presidency: it looked more like an ambush. By being served the warrant past court-business hours, she was denied her prompt right to bail and made to spend the night in detention. She went free on bail the next day.

It’s an old trick that appears to have become a reflex show of police power, a sort of institutional habit, as such free of malice and viciousness, relatively. It is certainly not the case with Ressa, however. She has been picked on and cast in a larger and darker scheme.

As she herself warned at the very moment of her arrest, “We are going to new lows...we should be worried.”

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The flimsy circumstances surrounding Ressa’s arrest have raised speculations that Duterte is desperate to accelerate his drive toward despotism. Indeed, libel – or some pretext of it – does seem a device too well-worn to use for the purpose.

But, having proved effective for them, not to mention being handy, libel has been long favored by people in power, people of wealth and influence, and people who like to keep up pretensions to a ruinable reputation. If it works for the lesser of them how could it not work for Duterte? Not only is he, after all, Chief Executive and Commander in Chief; judging by the vote he gets from Congress and the Supreme Court for his espousals, he has them co-opted. Anyway, I’m not sure about him being desperate. Impatient? Vicious? Mad even? Absolutely, but that’s all in the nature of his pathology.

Unable to accommodate a free and adversarial press in his autocratic mindset, he has held Rappler in particular contempt, in fact voicing his sentiment publicly and all too often, lest his enforcers fall out of alignment to his wishes. Sure enough, even before they were slapped with libel, Rappler and Ressa had already been taken to court – Rappler for a Securities offense, Ressa for tax evasion, both cases concocted, too, she says.

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Panelo also discourses minutely on judicial procedures and, in particular, on how supposedly these were observed faithfully and painstakingly in Rappler’s and Ressa’s cases. And, again, he skips an all-important point – the all-important point: quality of judicial decision-making; in other words, fairness.

That should rank, I must say, among the most serviceable side-stepping tricks Panelo has performed for Duterte and his courts and their beneficiaries – the Marcoses, the Arroyos, the Enriles, the Estradas, and the Revillas, to name only the most deserving. – Rappler.com

https://www.rappler.com/

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