Court rules that editor expressed ‘wrong’ opinion

A court in Mechelen has ruled against Yves Desmet, editor of the daily De Morgen, in a libel suit, finding that he expressed “wrong” views about a dispute between two judicial officials in a January 2012 editorial. The editorial was about a dispute between two members of the prosecutor’s office in Antwerp over an investigation into tax fraud on an allegedly gigantic scale in the local diamond sector. The judge in charge of the investigation, Peter Van Calster, wanted to prosecute diamond dealers suspected of evading nearly €300 million in taxes, while his superior, prosecutor-general Yves Liégeois, was reportedly pressing him to let the tax department and diamond dealers reach an agreement. In an article published on the newspaper’s opinion page, Desmet accused the prosecutor-general of being more interested in combatting black-market labour than in pursuing white-collar criminals, saying, “There seems to have been partiality. Or, if the term were not outmoded, class justice pure and simple.” In its January 15 ruling, the court found that “the suggestion of apparent partiality and the use of the term ‘class justice’ were based on a personal perception” and that Desmet’s comments were “wrong from the point of view of objective information”. Reporters Sans Frontières called the ruling “as absurd as it is outrageous”. “An editorial is not an exercise in investigative journalism or a factual report that has to be objective. It is by definition the free expression of an opinion, a series of ideas deriving solely from freedom of expression,” it said in a statement.