It has been a bad couple
of days for free expression in Latvia. I will rank the cases starting
with the one I consider the most brutal (and brutishly dumb) – the
nursing home Gauja in the town of Garkalne that expelled
Anita Arikāne, a 41-year old woman patient suffering from severe
cerebral palsy for a blog she typed by holding a toothbrush or other
object in her mouth.
The management of the
nursing home said that the blog, published on the Latvian social
network draugiem.lv was
offensive to the staff and management of Gauja. After
a cursory look at Anita's blog (it is rather chaotically organized
and difficult to follow) I found nothing directly insulting to the
nursing home. That does not mean there was no criticism, I just did
not see anything that could be considered libelous – no untrue
allegations of physical abuse, negligence or neglect. To be sure,
Anita appears profoundly disabled and in need of constant care,
something that would be extremely frustrating for even a few weeks,
never mind a lifetime. Moreover, caregivers in Latvian nursing homes
are underpaid and overworked – or, at least, that is a reasonable
assumption. So some friction between the staff and a patient seen as
privileged (Anita got her own room and an internet connection) could
well have occurred. But to evict a disabled patient effective
November 1, with apparently no process of adjudication, appeal or
mediation seems the height of brutish cruelty and an abuse of Anita
Arikāne's inalienable right to free expression.
While
we are on the subject of dumb behavior by country bumpkin
municipalities (that may not be the right term for a coastal town in
Latvia), it brings us to a refusal by the town of Salacgriva (which
hosts the Positivus
music festival in the summer) to allow a group of Latvian atheists to
put up a poster that said “ You don't believe in God? You are not
alone!” . The refusal was based on the argument that asking people
to contact the Latvian Atheist Society was not a commercial
advertisement for goods or services covered by municipal regulations
pertaining to permits to post commercial bills on public property
(lighting poles). As the Atheist Society points out, this was a
contrived excuse to refuse to display an “anti-religious”
message.
Not
to be outdone by their opponents in Salacgriva (in terms of doing
something off-the-wall), the atheists whose right to free expression
was violated are now asking the Riga municipal building department
(seems the municipal agencies that hand out building permits also
give permits to put up posters) to remove a religious poster “Life
without God, Life without meaning” that has been put up in Riga.
Asking for symmetric violation of free expression probably is not the
best tactic for resolving this matter,
Back
in the big city, Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs (Harmony Center/SC) has
decided to file suit against the independent magazine Ir
and its commentator Aivars Ozoliņš for libel for a commentary in
which he referred to the Riga municipal government as a
“kleptocracy”. Ušakovs joins a not so short list of thin-skinned
Latvian politicians who have reacted to harsh criticism by taking an
axe to freedom of speech. And they have picked the wrong guy. Ozoliņš
has been sued by politicians before – successfully as far as the
post-Soviet mentality Latvian courts go, but he won a free speech
case in the European Court of Human Rights in 2007 (for a case back
in the 1990s), getting a judgement for some EUR 10 000 plus court
costs. So here we go again...
Finally,
I don't know what to make of the Latvian President Andris Bērziņš
initiative to amend Latvian laws to impose harsher punishments on
“disrespecting” Latvia's coat of arms and the coats of arms of
Latvia's traditional districts – Kurzeme, Vidzeme, Zemgale and
Latgale. Bērzīņš has proposed that fines for “disrespecting”
these symbols should be as high as LVL 500. However, part of the
problem here could be murky journalism – reading the LETA agency
report more closely, it seems that the President was not addressing
the issue of using the coats of arms “disrespectfully” in
political expression, but rather what he considers their misuse for
commercial purposes. This may well be a different story of setting
rules for the use of national heraldic symbols on T-shirts and coffee
cups (assuming that the government holds some kind of copyright in
these coats of arms). Then again, it is a gray area as to whether
using Latvia's coat of arms in a protest T-shirt or poster could be
considered a violation of these laws. Any laws aimed at protecting
the national and regional coats of arms from ending up on cheap vodka
bottles should be written very carefully to ensure that they cannot
be abused or used to chill free expression.
