It was only last Friday morning that HRH’s secretariat was called upon by Hans Christian Magnus, one of its board members, to take action on behalf of an old friend of his, Bruce Harris, whose case was to reach its conclusion in a Guatemala City court that very day. The request was for HRH to appeal on Harris’ behalf, and so the secretariat did, as it turned out alongside numerous other international human rights agencies, among them the two biggest; Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW). In today’s statement from HRW on Harris’s case, the New York based agency quotes Michael Bochenek, counsel to the Children’s Rights Division of HRW: “The court’s ruling is a victory for freedom of expression. Nobody should face criminal charges for speaking out on a matter of public concern”.

Nevertheless, that was exactly what had happened to Harris. The defamation stemmed from comments Harris made at a September 1997 press conference in which Covenant House / Casa Alianza, the Catholic charity for which Harris is the Executive Director, together with the Attorney General of Guatemala presented the results of a joint investigation of irregular adoptions. After Harris accused a group of Guatemalan lawyers of involvement in the irregularities, one of the lawyers brought a private criminal action against him. 

The Guatemalan penal code criminalizes speech that “dishonours, discredits, or disparages another person,” regardless of whether the statement is true. The most serious of these provisions carries a prison sentence of up to five years. In addition to providing criminal penalties for defamation and disallowing truth as a defense, Guatemala places narrow limits on its constitutional right to the “free dissemination of ideas,” which only the media enjoy. Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled in 1999 that Harris did not benefit from the protection of that provision because he is not a journalist. 

Criminal defamation laws are common in Latin America, and other cases pending in the Inter-American system illustrate thewir potential for abuse. In one case now before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a candidate for Paraguay’s presidency received a four-month prison sentence for statements he made about another candidate in the course of his election campaign. In another case accepted by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the Panamanian attorney general obtained a criminal conviction against a journalist for criticizing him. 

HRW called on Guatemala to guarantee fully an individual’s right to freedom of expression, as protected by international treaties to which the country is a party. In particular, Guatemala should eliminate criminal penalties for defamation in cases that do not involve direct and immediate incitement to acts of violence, discrimination or hostility, HRW said.

Harris’s own comment was characteristically modest: “It is not me who has won this case,” he said. “Those who won are the people who want to resolve the social problems that affect the childhood of this country”. Harris, who has been living in Costa Rica since his offices in Guatemala City were sprayed with bullets ten years ago, has received numerous awards for his work for orphanaged children, not only in Guatemala, but also in Mexico and other Central American countries. In 2000, Britain also awarded him the OBE, Order of the British Empire, medal and title, for his work with homeless children. Great Britain, USA, Germany, Canada and Holland were among the countries whose embassies sent observers to Harris’s case. US Ambassador John Hamilton was in the front row of spectators.

Frank La Rue of the Guatemalan government’s human rights commission said he was “delighted” with the verdict, adding that the government had not in any way intervened in the case. The verdict also fits in with the freshly inaugurated president Oscar Berger’s pledge not only to decriminalise the country’s defamation laws, but also to shed Guatemala’s image as a human rights violator. Berger, a landowner and businessman, took office only two weeks ago after four years of controversial rule by a party led by former dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Amnesty International has described the use of criminal defamation charges against human rights defenders in Guatemala as “yet another form of persecution”. Hence, Casa Alianza members and a host of other human rights workers burst into applause when the verdict was announced.

HRH wishes to thank everyone within the HRH network who appealed on Harris’s behalf.