Media News - Monday, December 15, 2008

Nicolas Sarkozy calls for French libel reform

French president Nicholas Sarkozy has called for legal reform to decriminalise defamation following a case in which a former newspaper editor was arrested, detained and strip-searched. Vittorio de Filippis, a former editor-in-chief of the French daily newspaper Libération, was arrested at his home by three police officers - one of whom called him 'worse than scum' - then held at a police station before he was taken before a magistrate. The Washington Post reported that de Filippis was arrested at 6:40am on 28 November and detained until about 11.30am as part of the police investigation into a two-year-old defamation case. De Filippis wrote that he was manhandled, handcuffed, humiliated in front of his sons, twice forced to strip and submit to body cavity searches and interrogated without lawyers by an investigating magistrate. The case prompted an outcry among journalists, lawyers, politicians and others, who condemned the police behaviour as out of place in a country with traditions of the rule of law and freedom of expression. President Sarkozy has now issued a statement calling for the penal code to be revised so as to decriminalise defamation - a criminal offence in France, punishable only by a fine. He also called for a new amendment to criminal procedures to make them more human and transparent. (Press Gazette)

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