Yabloko Takes Speaker, Channel 5 to Task
By Vladimir Kovalev
Staff Writer
The St. Petersburg branch of the Yabloko party is defending its reputation in a legal battle with Vadim Tyulpanov, the speaker of the city’s Legislative Assembly and head of the Kremlin-loyal United Russia party. The dispute is based on comments by Tyulpanov that Yabloko had paid participants in a protest outside the Legislative Assembly against the replacement of in-kind benefits with cash. The speaker’s press service said Friday that Tyulpanov had no comment on the lawsuit. The speaker also declined to send a lawyer to a preliminary hearing of the suit on Friday. Maxim Reznik, head of the city branch of Yabloko, said the St. Petersburg city court agreed to hear Yabloko’s case, and would hold a further hearing on July 22. “We have had negotiations today [at the court] and clarified all the circumstances of the matter,” Reznik said Friday in a telephone interview. “We don’t want any money from Tyulpanov. All we would get are 30 pieces of silver from him and we don’t want this. “All we want is confirmation that what he said was a lie,” he added. Yabloko alleges that Tyulpanov twice made allegations that the party paid protesters to take part in a rally on the St. Isaac’s Square next to the Legislative Assembly building on Feb. 16. “I believe, the organizers who organized this demonstration, [and] who are, in fact, present at the rally, have been paid. They, in their turn, buy people for the rally, by paying them,” Tyulpanov said to reporters on the day of the rally. “The protesters in the rally were paid … people were getting money in buses after the rallies finished,” he said in another interview, quoted by the local media. Yabloko’s first response to the allegations was to organize “a visit of ordinary citizens” to Tyulpanov’s office in the Legislative Assembly on March 23. Yabloko issued single-entry passes to the city parliament for several of their activists. But Tyulpanov has banned anyone using any passes for the whole day after he found out about the attempt by the protesters to enter his office. Last Monday, Yabloko went to city court with another lawsuit, alleging that City Hall-controlled television station Channel 5 had defamed the party. The suit concerns a statement by anchor Igor Fesunenko, host of news program Glavnoye, who on Jan. 30 said that the party had organized protesting rallies together with skinheads. The lawsuit was filed after the party received an official refusal from the management of Channel 5 to broadcast an apology for the statement. Yabloko had demanded the apology under the federal media law, which provides for false statements to be corrected. “There are no legal grounds to broadcast a retraction, according to the current law,” Rosbalt on June 27 quoted Andrei Shishkin, deputy director of Channel 5, as saying in his official reply to Yabloko. “The text proposed [by Yabloko] for broadcast is not in accordance with the norms of the media law,” the reply said. But Andrei Richter, director of Moscow’s Media Law and Policy Institute, said Yabloko has grounds for a suit if it is certain the information broadcast by Channel 5 was incorrect. “According to the media law Articles No. 43, 44 and 45 as well as Article No. 152 of the Civil Code a retraction should be placed if a media outlet has released incorrect information in relation to a registered organization. As far as I know, Yabloko is a registered organization, so for this reason they have grounds to demand a retraction in accordance to the Civil Code and the media law if they are sure that the information was incorrect,” Richter said Friday in a telephone interview. The suit against Channel 5 is due to be heard in the Kuibyshevsky district court in September. Human rights advocates on Friday supported Yabloko, saying that the authorities are playing a dirty game and not fulfilling their statutory obligations. “When Tyulpanov has irresponsibly accused some organization of setting up a protest against the violation of their rights, such as that pensioners have been deprived of the right to free transportation, as a state authority he should be held responsible for doing that,” Yury Vdovin, co-head of the city branch of human rights organization Citizen’s Watch said Friday in a telephone interview. “As for Channel 5, as a media outlet set up using taxpayers’ money, it has to provide them with objective information … . The problem is that the authorities don’t want people to be informed and to make such conclusions,” he said. o Opposition parties are demanding airtime on state television and radio, The Associated Press quoted the liberal Yabloko party as announcing Friday. In a letter sent Thursday to President Vladimir Putin and the heads of Channel One and Rossia and Radio Russia, the parties demanded that weekly live radio and television political debates be held with the participation of the country’s different political parties. Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and the Communist and nationalist Rodina parties, among others, formed a committee to defend free speech in May. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev objected to the growing state control over media earlier this year on the 20th anniversary of his pioneering policy of perestroika, or restructuring.
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