In a judgment pronounced on October 18th, a Paris court threw out a legal suit brought against Mediapart by French businessman and politician Serge Dassault. The billionaire, who heads the Dassault Group, a defence, aviation, media and property empire founded by his father Marcel Dassault, had applied for a censorship order on the contents of audio recordings published by Mediapart in which he can be heard confirming his participation in electoral fraud.
The judgment on Friday amounts to a halt in the attacks upon the freedom of the press that were witnessed earlier this year in the Bettencourt affair.
It was made in an exceptional collegial decision taken by a panel of three magistrates of the Paris court’s 17th chamber (Marc Bailly, who headed the panel, Anne-Marie Sauteraud and Julien Senel). Their decision represented a significant victory for press freedom, obtained by Mediapart’s lawyers Jean-Pierre Mignard and Emmanuel Tordjman.
Following the recent judicial excesses that resulted in both the incomprehensible ruling that ordered the censorship of Mediapart’s published articles and recordings relating to the so-called ‘Butler tapes’ in the Bettencourt affair (see more on this here and here ), and the absurd decision to send Mediapart journalists for trial for invasion of privacy regarding the same revelations in the Bettencourt affair (see more here), the October 18th judgment amounts to a return to a proper balance of the scales of justice in France.
It is one that weighs up the public interest of publishing information against the manner in which it was obtained, however arguably illegal this may have been, and whereby this last consideration is not allowed to obscure the fundamental right to information.
The full text of the judgment (in French only):
On September 15th, Mediapart published the first of a series of articles of its ongoing investigation into Dassault’s activities in the town of Corbeil-Essonnes, a Paris suburb where he was once mayor. The town is situated in the Essonne département (equivalent to a county) immediately south of Paris and which Dassault represents as a Senator for the conservative opposition UMP party. The September 15th article was published simultaneously in English, under the title ‘French billionaire Serge Dassault secretly recorded saying he paid money to 'buy' election win’, and in French, under the title ‘Serge Dassault : l’aveu de la corruption’. Written by Fabrice Arfi, Michaël Hajdenberg and Pascale Pascariello, it revealed three extracts from a conversation held between Dassault and two other men in November 2012 at the town hall in Corbeil-Essonnes. The two men met with Dassault to protest over the failure of a key figure in what has become described as “the Dassault System” to redistribute 1.7 million euros that were earmarked for people helping, in the lower-income districts of Corbeil-Essonnes, to secure the 2010 election victory of Jean-Pierre Bechter as Dassault’s successor as mayor.
In a second article published by Mediapart on September 16th (see the article published on Mediapart English here), one of those who took part in this system, one which he now denounces, explained in detail to Mediapart how the meeting was arranged as a pretext to obtain evidence, directly from Serge Dassault, of these corrupt electoral practices and to knock down a wall of silence that had been erected around them.
Recorded by a hidden camera, Senator Dassault spoke in terms that left no doubt about both his personal involvement in commissioning these criminal practices and his clear understanding of their illegal nature.
“There, I can't give any more,” Dassault says in the recording. “I can no longer get anything out, it's banned [...] I'm being watched. I'm under surveillance by the police […] The money has been given, completely. Me, I gave the money. I can no longer give a penny to anybody. I can no longer get out the money for anybody. There's no more Lebanon. There's no longer anyone over there, it's over. Me, I gave the money […] If it's been badly distributed, that's not my fault,” he says. “I'm not going to pay twice. Me, I've paid everything, so I'm not giving a penny more to anybody. If it's Younès [Editor's note: the man who allegedly did not hand out the money as planned], sort it out with him. Me, I can't do anything.”
Reacting to the publication of this information that was manifestly of public interest, (to the degree that Mediapart was, on the initiative of the justice services, immediately asked by the police to provide them with the three recorded extracts that it had published online), Serge Dassault filed a lawsuit against Mediapart on September 23rd in an attempt to quite simply censor publication of the contents of the conversation.
In a subsequent court hearing on October 8th, Dassault demanded the removal of “all publication, written or audiovisual, of all parts of the recordings […] on the Mediapart website, and/or any other paper, digital or other publication” edited by Mediapart or published “with its direct or indirect assistance”. He also demanded that Medipart be fined 10,000 euros per day for any delay in removing references to the contents of the conversation. Furthermore, he asked the court magistrates to prohibit Mediapart from making any reference to them in the future.
A welcome new legal precedent
Serge Dassault, whose Groupe Dassault owns the influential French daily Le Figaro, and his lawyer Jean Veil, hoped to gain a repeat of the stupefying move by the Versailles appeals court which, in a ruling pronounced earlier this year on Mediapart’s published revelations of high-level corruption in the Bettencourt affair, flouted all legal precedents protecting press freedom and the revelation of information of public interest in the name of the invasion of personal privacy. Mediapart’s lawyers, who reminded the court that this website has lodged an appeal against that iniquitous decision (for more on this subject see this editorial) mounted a vigorous defence of citizens’ right to know (to download the text of their concluding arguments, in French, click here).
Using the pretext of invasion of privacy, citing the secret nature in which the recordings were made, Serge Dassault engaged in effect in diverting the procedure of justice to attack journalists’ rights of defence. Because, while mounting no challenge against the veracity of the contents of the conversation recorded, he made no move to attack Mediapart for defamation. Had he done so, the recordings would have obviously been accepted as the proof of the truth of the information published by Mediapart and the proper conduct of our investigation. Just as the so-called ‘Butler tapes’ were admitted as evidence in the judicial investigation into the Bettencourt affair. Any move to censor them on the basis of how they were carried out, and without any debate over the conditions in which they were revealed – that is, that they were of public interest and that the journalistic investigation was led with professionalism - is naturally also a move to destroy the proof. That in itself prevents the press from invoking its essential means of defence while also depriving the public of equally essential information.
By dismissing all of the premises of Serge Dassault’s suit against Mediapart, and also ordering him to pay Mediapart and its journalists the sum of 4,000 euros, the postponed ruling announced by the Paris court on October 18th recognised the arguments presented in Mediapart’s defence and quite explicitly did so on the grounds of the rights of freedom of the press.
Instead of the blindness shown by the Versailles appeals court this summer regarding the Bettencourt affair, when it refused any debate about the contents, and therefore the legitimacy, of the information we published, the Paris court underlined “the interest that is joined to the informing of the public about questions of general interest”. At the same time, the argument behind its conclusions sounds somewhat like an indictment such it underlines the public interest, and by the same process the gravity, of the events revealed by the contents of the recordings.
“It is not contestable,” the court magistrates said in their ruling, “that the [Mediapart] article, relative to the role that may have been played by Monsieur Dassault, a major industrial figure, head of a media organization, Senator and [former] mayor of Corbeil-Essones from 1995 to 2008, in the establishing of a system of ‘vote buying’ to ensure the election of someone close to him as successor to head the town hall, raises several significant questions of general interest which go beyond, given the personality of the plaintiff and the nature of the practices involved, the local electoral issues alone and place in doubt public probity, the sincerity of the vote, the relations between elected representatives and citizens, and diverse questions about the social relations in certain French municipalities.”
Underlining that Serge Dassault “does not challenge the authenticity of the recording nor the the reality of the words uttered by him,” the magistrates stressed “that he refers to the illegality of the deposit of funds and the impossibility of [further] withdrawals of them because of the surveillance ‘by the police’ […] the circumstance itself that these words were said well constitutes a precise piece of information in relation to the issues of general interest concerned by the article […]”.
The court concluded that the written and sound recorded quotes published by Mediapart “are not in any matter related to the private life of Monsieur Dassault”. What’s more, the magistrates found that “the conditions in which they were recorded, during 24 minutes, in an office of the Corbeil-Essonnes town hall, by people having obtained an appointment who sought, according to the plaintiff, to extort funds from him, were not of a nature to allow revelations of matters concerning the private life of the plaintiff”.
Following the deviation from its rightful path witnessed in the Bettencourt affair, French justice has returned to upholding the protection of the right to know with its decision in the Dassault case - a case which quite clearly has only just begun.
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English version by Graham Tearse