About this service
The central sanctioning stamp of media law within freedom-of-expression legislation is the defamation regime — and it is precisely there that the main source of journalistic risk lies. The Law of Georgia on Freedom of Speech and Expression builds this field on several supports: the absolute protection of professional secrecy and its source, the differing standards of defamation of private and public figures, the boundaries of liability and the procedure for compensating harm. This page reads those norms from a media-compliance standpoint: what an editorial office must know so that published material does not become the subject of a claim, and what arguments remain in its hands if a claim is brought nonetheless.
The absolute protection of the source of information
Article 11 of the law protects the source of professional secrecy with an absolute privilege: no one is entitled to demand its disclosure, and in court proceedings concerning restriction of freedom of speech a respondent may not be burdened with the obligation to disclose the source of confidential information. This guarantee is the foundation of journalism — without source protection, investigative journalism is impossible.
The boundaries of the privilege are likewise prescribed in detail: disclosure of confidential information is impermissible even with the consent of its holder, or in cases provided by law, without a justified court decision. The court is authorised to issue an order on securing evidence only in connection with the disclosure of that part whose necessity of disclosure has been proven, and information received through disclosure may be used only for the purpose for which it was disclosed.
Defamation of a private person
Article 13 of the law constructs the defamation claim of a private person. A claimant who considers himself or herself the addressee of defamation must submit to the court the statement he or she regards as defamatory, indicate in the claim what substantially false fact about him or her the statement contains, and substantiate why that statement is injurious to his or her reputation. This structure of the claim matters to the media as well: it shows exactly what the defence of liability must be built around.
The allocation of responsibility is shifted here: the respondent bears liability for defamation if he or she fails to prove that the disputed statement does not contain a substantially false fact about the claimant. In other words, in the case of an ordinary private person the burden of proving truth rests on the media — the substantiation of a published fact must be prepared in advance.