Justice finally turns around. The Mediapart newspaper is finally authorized, this Wednesday, to publish an investigation into the mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau, initially censored by an order.
Last Friday, the director of the investigative media, Edwy Plenel, came to ask the Paris court “to put an end as soon as possible to an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the press”.
But the case had been put under deliberation, to the disappointment of Mediapart, supported at the hearing by Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), trade unions, the Human Rights League and associations of the judicial press and lawyers practicing press law.
An order censoring the publication of an investigation
In their sights, an order, issued urgently by the same court on November 18, at the request of the mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau (ex-LR), invoking an invasion of privacy, without Mediapart having could defend themselves.
This decision prohibits him from publishing new information taken from an audio recording of the elected representative from Saint-Etienne, after a series of revelations on a case of blackmail on intimate video, “under penalty of 10,000 euros per extract published”.
However, the Mediapart investigation is of “major public interest”, argued Edwy Plenel, recounting how a mayor uses “the poison of slander” as a “political weapon to discredit” an opponent, Laurent Wauquiez, President LR of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
It was a question of “nipping in the bud” a “very serious slanderous rumor” and “without any foundation by the admission of its propagator”, added the journalist. Above all, “it is not up to the court to check beforehand information that has not been published”, insisted Mediapart’s lawyer, Emmanuel Tordjman.
“It is the seriousness of your decision”, he launched to the magistrate Violette Baty, asking her to retract the order made by her. This Wednesday, Laurent Wauquiez has also announced to file a complaint against Gaël Perdriau for defamation.
Press rights challenged
“Legal disaster”, “heresy”… the lawyers for the various supporters of Mediapart castigated in turn an “unprecedented” decision which “pulverizes press law” in force since 1881, believing that the judge had been “deceived”.
“It is deeply unfair to say that our objective was to undermine freedom of expression”, for his part defended Me Christophe Ingrain, the lawyer for Gaël Perdriau – absent at the hearing -, invoking the right to private life.
However, it is the freedom of the press that is at stake, according to a text of support for Mediapart signed by around thirty journalists’ companies, including those of Le Monde, AFP, Liberation and BFMTV. They are more generally concerned about the proliferation of “gag procedures” in France and the recent lawsuits initiated by the Altice group (SFR, BFMTV) against the information site Reflets, seen as “a diversion” of press law.
In reaction to the procedure targeting Mediapart, the centrist senator Nathalie Goulet tabled a bill last week guaranteeing that a publication can “be prohibited only in application of a judicial decision rendered contradictorily”.
But “that does not answer the question at all”, deplores Dominique Pradalié, the president of the IFJ, who would prefer “provisions making it possible to sanction much more seriously the abuses against the freedom of the press, attacked from all sides”.