Media News - Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Israeli reporter gets four months over secret papers

A reporter with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Uri Blau, was sentenced to four months of community service under a plea bargain for possessing classified military documents, the court said on Monday. He will serve his community service at Reut medical centre in Tel Aviv.Blau was convicted at Tel Aviv District Court in July of possessing secret army papers that he received from a former soldier who was subsequently jailed on charges of spying. As part of the plea bargain, which was agreed with the State Prosecutor’s Office on July 5, Blau agreed to admit to the charge of possessing secret information without intending to harm state security. “This is a precedent-setting prosecution of a journalist for doing his job,” one of his lawyers, Jack Hen, said at the time, adding that Blau should not have been charged and that all of his reports had been cleared by the military censor. “According to it, the public’s right to know and freedom of the press were seriously damaged by the decision to put a journalist on trial for these reasons,” he told Haaretz website. (The News)

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