28 March, 2019

Case - N256



Head of Council: Nana Biganishvili

Members of Council: Giorgi Mgeladze, Lika Zakashvili, Irma Zoidze, Kamila Mamedova, Giorgi Suladze

Applicant: LGBTQI Association Temida

Respondent: Nugzar Rukhadze

Description Part

LGBTQI Association Temida applied to Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics. They thought that the OP-ED that English Language edition of georgiatoday.ge published on 31st of January, 2019, titled “Feminism, Gayism, Drugism & All That Jazz” violated Charter principles 1, 5 and 7. The author of journalistic material and therefore the respondent was identified to be Nugzar Rukhadze.

Representative of the applicant attended the hearing while the respondent did not attend or provide any response. At first, applicant thought that only 7th principle was violated in the material but during hearing they added 1st and 5th principle violations to the application. Therefore, respondent was given an additional week to respond to added principles, but Charter did not get any response from him.

Motivation Part

According to the first principle of the Charter: Journalist must respect truth and the right of the society to get precise information”. Article in question is an OP-ED about feministic and queer movements and the author states his mainly negative opinions about them. But at the same time, he provides certain issues as a fact. For example, author says that it is feministic idea that “a father and a husband are main enemies of a woman”; “continuous propaganda against families and marriage are encouraged by feminists in the world”; “[according to feminists] a child does not need mother’s love, because this is a myth created by humans”. The author does not provide any sources or evidence, which prove that a fight against ideas of family, marriage, and motherhood are feministic propaganda points. In reality, feminism is a movement which protects women’s rights, their equality to men in social, political, economic and cultural fields. Even if we think that certain radical feministic movements or their members share ideas attributed to feminism in this article, fight against “family”, “mother”, “marriage”, it is still manipulative to say that these are defining characteristics of feminism and therefore disseminated information is not correct.

Sharing such incorrect information in Georgia, where femicide and generally, domestic abuse against women is an acute issue, is more problematic. According to data provided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there were 1705 cases of physical violence against women documented in 2018. According to the research conducted by UN women organization, Georgian National Agency of Statistics and EU, 1 in every 7 women in Georgia is a victim of domestic violence.

5th principle of Charter: Media is obligated to correct any incorrect information which misleads the public. The applicant provided to the Charter council the messages sent on Facebook to the representative of georgiatoday.ge Maia Tsereteli, where Temida asked her to correct the article. At the time of the hearing, the article was not corrected, therefore, 5th principle violation was decided upon.

According to the 7th principle of Charter: Journalist should be aware of dangers for encouraging discrimination; therefore, they should do everything to avoid discriminating a person based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other views, national or social origin or any other characteristic. Charter council thinks, that the material in question includes ample examples of hate speech and encourages discrimination of different groups. A citation: “Gayism is also stopping Georgia’s demographic boom”. Term “gayism” is incorrect and supports homophobic bullying because this term describes homosexuality not as a natural characteristic of a person, but an “ideological path”. Homophobic people usually use this as an argument to bully others. It is worth mentioning, that there is no scientific proof, research, which provides arguments that supporting homosexual people’s rights causes demographic decline. This type of reasoning only provides negative attitudes toward homosexual people in society.

Media product is also heavy with a stigma against people with drug addiction. “There are other people who stop the nation’s survival possibility. These are people with drug addiction and homosexual people, as an alternative of sexual physical life”. Council shares the idea of an applicant, that this phrase “encourages discrimination against the group, which should be seen by the government in care and damage control programs”. Council adds that calling sexual minorities and people with drug addiction “damaging”, is a hate speech. According to Europe Council Ministry Committee of 1977 recommendation hate speech is “any type of expression, which shares, encourages, provokes or agrees with xenophobia, racial tension, anti-Semitism or showing intolerance via different way – ethnocentrism, nationalism, discrimination, hostility towards minorities or migrants; supports negative attitudes against groups different in one way or another”.

Charter council also talked about feministic movements while discussing the first principle, where author also manipulates with information and creates incorrect assumptions in readers about the movement’s idea/goals. This type of manipulation causes the 7th principle to be violated, because it shows feminism as a fight against family/father/husband/child and not as a movement of women’s rights.

Therefore, we see discrimination based on sexual orientation, support of stigmatization of feminists and people with drug addiction, usage of hate speech. These are causes to decide that 7th principle was violated.

Charter council wants to focus on messages of Temida representative and Maia Tsereteli, representative of georgiatoday.ge on Facebook. Maia Tsereteli said there that the material was an OP-ED, an author’s opinion and not a representative of publishing. Council first of all wants to say that a respondent is designated to be a person, an author and not the whole publishing in any case. Council also thinks that an OP-ED does not lift the responsibility from media to follow ethical guidelines, especially when we are talking about discrimination, hate speech or stigmatization. Media has a positive, social responsibility to do everything to avoid discrimination of every person and should not be transformed into a platform which is discriminating and sharing stigmatization and hate speech.

Resolution Part

According to the information provided above:

Nugzar Rukhadze violated Charter principles 1, 5 and 7.