Mikalai Charhinets Will Keep an Eye on the Press
Belarusian Association of Journalists reports that general and an MP Mikalai Charhinets doesn’t exclude that he may sue the media outlets that cited the arguable article “General–Senator Mikalai Charhinets” by Alaksandr Tamkovich in their publications. He made the statement during his press-conference on January 3, 2008.
M. Charhinets showed a large pile of printouts from the Internet and copies of publications, where journalists cited different parts of the article. The politician believes some statements in the press, related to the claim, may deserve separate trials. However, reportedly, he hasn’t addressed to the court yet and made up his mind to keep and eye on the press in the meantime.
Among other, M. Charhinets noted that the sum of his moral damages was “normal for such a newspaper”.
It should be reminded that the Piershamayski City District Court of Minsk decided to exact 50 million Belarusian rubles from the “Novy Chas” weekly publisher and 1 million Belarusian rubles from the author of the arbitrary publication Alaksandar Tamkovich as moral damages to Mikalai Charhinets.
The judge Alena Ananich found a range of quotations from the article “General–Senator Mikalai Charhinets” by Alaksandr Tamkovich contrary to fact and offensive. The publication appeared on pages of “Novy Chas” independent weekly on September 24, 2007 (No.25).
Moreover, the court obliged the defendants to refute the facts, distributed in the article, to express apologies to M. Charhinets and reimburse all litigation expenses within the case.
During one of press-conferences at the beginning of December 2007, M. Charhinets declared that he was not interested at all in the further fate of the periodical edition.
