Switzerland: Whistleblowers cleared by military court
01 July 2007
A military court has acquitted three Swiss journalists of "violating military secrecy" for publishing details of secret prisons run by the CIA in eastern Europe and elsewhere. Christopher Grenacher, editor of the Zurich-based
SonntagsBlick, and two journalists on the paper, Sandro Brotz and Beat Jost, were charged after publishing a leaked fax "dealing with supposed places of detention and interrogation methods used by the US foreign intelligence service (CIA)." The newspaper published details of the fax, sent from the Egyptian foreign ministry to Cairo's embassy in London and intercepted by Swiss military intelligence, in January 2006. In the fax the Egyptian Foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, is said to have confirmed the presence of a US "interrogation" centre in Romania and to have suggested that other illegal sites existed in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia and the Ukraine. Last June a European parliamentary committee headed by Dick Marty found that more than a dozen European countries had colluded in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA interrogation centres and the abduction of terrorist suspects. It is perhaps germane to note that the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has condemned the Swiss military for using legal proceedings to intimidate journalists.
The case raised other relevant issues. Switzerland is the only European country where civilians are expected to appear in front of a military tribunal if they are summoned to do so and the appearance of the journalists had serious implications for press freedom. Several Swiss journalists have been fined by military courts in recent years after publishing critical articles and in 2006 a journalist was sentenced to 20 days imprisonment after reporting on a bunker's construction faults. Before the
SonntagsBlick journalist's appearance politicians, trades unions, journalists and other civil libertarians had demanded a "free media instead of military courts". The president of the Swiss Press Council, Peter Studer, argued that military courts were not "in keeping with the times" while Reporters Without Borders questioned the legitimacy of the decision to try the journalists before a military tribunal.
See Statewatch Observatory on rendition
http://www.statewatch.org/rendition/rendition.html
Reporters Without Borders website:
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique/.php3?id_rubrique=20
European Federation of Journalists website: http://www.ifj-europe.org/
Free Press no 157 (March-April) 2007; Swiss Info 17.4.07