Rights defenders treat judgement to reduce fine on Ura.Ru as compromise

The decision of the Supreme Court (SC) of Chechnya to significantly reduce the multimillion fine imposed on the Ura.Ru edition for a publication about the road accident with the participation of the Chechen prosecutor could be a compromise, since the guilt of the edition is in doubt, while claimant is an influential person, said Galina Arapova, Director of the Media Rights Protection Centre. The case with Ura.Ru was the result of public attention to the problem of media relationships with authorities, Nadezhda Azhgikhina, a journalist and human rights defender, has suggested.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on February 15, the court in Chechnya satisfied the claim of the former prosecutor Murat Zalzaev and appointed him 15 million roubles as compensation for moral harm for the publication of the Ura.Ru about the road accident in which he got. The edition insisted that it did not name Zalzaev as the culprit in the accident. Russia has never recovered such large sums of money from the media as compensation for moral harm, said Pavel Babikov, the head of the Babikov & Partners law firm. Today, the Chechen SC has reduced the amount of the fine from 15 million roubles to 30,000 roubles. The defence has treated this judgement as fair.

The road accident, of which Zalzaev became a participant, occurred on August 26, 2017, in Grozny. Then a man and a woman perished.

The decrease in the amount of compensation for moral harm down to 30,000 roubles is, on the one hand, an indicator that the SC of Chechnya paid attention to the groundlessness of the decision made by the first-instance court, Ms Arapova said.

Probably, the Ura.Ru remained a sort of a "whipping boy" in this situation, she has noted. "After all, they referred to primary sources, which then cleaned up their publications," Galina Arapova has explained.

When the society pays little attention to the media, their situation worsens, says Nadezhda Azhgikhina, a journalist and human rights defender. "We are at the beginning of the road, when the society must understand again that media protect society's interests independently, responsibly and efficiently," she has stated.