Court hits KP Publications with Hr 100,000 damages for "defaming" private Kyiv university and its publications, which popular news magazine described as anti-Semitic
KP Publications President Jed Sunden has slammed as an infringement of freedom of speech an Aug. 5 court ruling against his company in a defamation suit brought by Kyiv’s Interregional Academy for Personnel Management (MAUP).
In its ruling, the Pechersk District Court ordered KP Publications to pay Hr 80,000 to MAUP and Hr 20,000 to Ihor Slissarenko, the editor of its monthly magazine, for defamatory comments in an article published in Korrespondent magazine last February.
KP Publications, which publishes Korrespondent and the Kyiv Post, has vowed to appeal the verdict.
“[The ruling is] bad for freedom of speech and bad for Ukraine,” Sunden said. “Hopefully, the courts will come to their senses.”
Sunden said that the scale of damages was disproportionate.
“These are such huge fines for such small infractions,” he said. “To make a not-particularly controversial comment about a public figure, and then to be hit with such a fine, indicates that there’s a clear and present danger to press freedom.”
Sunden also claimed KP Publications had been improperly penalized for factual inaccuracies contained in the magazine article.
“Errors of fact, not intent, are not liable under any standard,” Sunden said.
MAUP attracted attention last year from Korrespondent, the Kyiv Post and the weekly newspaper Stolichniye Novosti, for its association with allegedly anti-Semitic figures including David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.
In 2002, Duke received an honorary degree from the International Personnel Academy, an NGO founded by and closely associated with the school.
Attention also focused on Personnel magazine, the academy’s publication, which published allegedly anti-Semitic articles by Duke and others.
In the wake of the negative publicity, a number of public figures, including Our Ukraine bloc leader Viktor Yushchenko and former President Leonid Kravchuk either severed ties with the school or distanced themselves from it.
The Post’s repeated efforts to get Slissarenko, who is also vice president of MAUP, to comment on the ruling were unsuccessful.
In her ruling, Judge Olena Kafidova rejected KP Publications’ argument that the Feb. 18 Korrespondent article, which was unsigned, was grounded in an objective analysis of Personnel’s content.
“The court cannot accept the contention by the defendant’s lawyer that the information published in the disputed article was formulated by analyzing the publications, because the information about the plaintiffs was stated in a categorical form,” Kafidova’s decision read.
Inna Lishik, KP Publications’ legal advisor, pointed to ambiguity in the court ruling. In presenting their case, the plaintiffs abstracted from the Korrespondent piece three statements they claimed were factually inaccurate but not defamatory, and two more they claimed were both factually inaccurate and defamatory. In judging that the plaintiffs had been defamed, however, the judge conflated all five statements.
“The judge merged everything and described all five phrases as defamation,” Lishik said. “It was not made clear why the judge considers all five to be so.”
Lishik pointed out that factual inaccuracy is not defamation.
Though it ruled for the plaintiffs in the matter of the Feb. 18 article, the court dismissed the plaintiffs’ contention that they had also been defamed in another Korrespondent article written by Sunden and published Jan. 21. That article pointedly addressed the controversy surrounding MAUP.
The judgement read: “The court considers that the plaintiff’s demands when it comes to refuting the facts expressed by Jed Sunden … are not to be satisfied, because they are the personal opinions of the author.”
The ruling against KP Publications was not MAUP’s first venture into litigation. This May, Stolichniye Novosti lost a Hr 3 million defamation suit to a group of plaintiffs including MAUP, Slissarenko and the school’s president Heorhy Shchokin.
The court ruled that the newspaper had damaged the plaintiffs’ reputations in a series of articles published in early 2002.
Further progress on that case, which has also been appealed, is pending.
Yulianna Vilkos contributed to this story.
