President of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic

Pavel Rychetský

Dear President of the European Court of Human Rights,
Dear Minister,
Your Eminence, Cardinal Duka,
Dear General Attorney,
Dear Chairmen of both Supreme Courts,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the Constitutional Court I would first like to welcome all participants. I want to thank the organizers for the invitation and for the opportunity to address this important international conference. Over the past weekend, I was thinking about how fair trial and the media correlate with each other. And I must be frank to say that I have not found any satisfactory answer.

The reason may be that we live in times of information inflation or obesity.

My generation used to get information about the world mainly from newspapers. Frankly speaking, until 1990 leafing through just one newspaper and being able to read in between the lines was just enough, because plurality of views was out of the question.

I mentioned “information obesity” which is just the opposite to the former communist “information diet”. Today, information is everywhere: in cellphones, on monitors, videos; it is filtered, personalized, there is so much of it that we are no longer able to absorb it. With the onset of the Internet and its news platforms the traditional journalism started to be fragmented. This fragmentation also concerns media information – a distinction between reporting and commentaries fades away. And so, information mixes up with opinion, conviction with indignation, and facts with sentiments. Bloggers and commentators mostly do not care about facts at all.

Zygmunt Bauman wrote a book twelve years ago on “liquid modernity” which is an outstanding reflection on our modernity. This liquidity moves to media modernity which must be mainly colorful, brief, with catchy headlines, and immediately accessible. I ask therefore, and I am sure I am not alone here, how can we insert such a complex construct of the right to a fair trial in this condensed form? And I will pose a second, perhaps heretical, question: Does the consumer of information care at all?

I would like to outline several observations from the Constitutional Court practice. I hope they will be informative and to the point.

The Constitutional Court findings are always announced in public, under a relatively big interest of journalists. A detailed justification and considerations leading us to a certain decision, are addressed mainly to them because the public is usually not present. During the explanation of our decision, journalists would manipulate intensively their cellphones and be bored. I would be ready to meet with them after the announcement and answer their questions because that is how a transparent and open judiciary should behave. Do you know what their question would usually be?

Can you summarize today’s decision? Ten pages of legal arguments they heard a while ago, are forgotten. I would try hard to formulate at least two or three structural theses which support the finding even though all underlying supporting arguments are marginalized. And the next day I would read in the newspapers that the Constitutional Court has intimidated executors. But the reader would not know that not the execution but the right to fair trial in the following legal proceedings, was the issue. Therefore, I must note here that not all of us – fifteen members of the Constitutional Court – are prepared to comment again on the findings to journalist in a condensed form. The audiovisual media in particular are used to put the camera or a microphone in front of you insisting to “explain your decision but only in two sentences.”

What I said does not mean that we should not try to present the results of our work in their completeness. The Constitutional Court issues some 150 press releases on its activities annually. We publish all decisions on the web database NALUS, we are active on the Facebook and the Twitter, and yet we are not able to defeat the media shortcuts.

Unfortunately, that is the reality which I do not like. But if I close my eyes and hold my breath, it does not disappear. Times will not change, and fortunately, those times when the topic of the day was set by the opening page of the only daily are gone. My grandchildren do not read newspapers, they get the information on-line, sort of by the way; they prefer opinion blogs, videos to the news and analyses. The YouTube records 720 000 hours of videos every day, and it would be illusory to think that they would be monitored in order to promote objectivity.

Information obesity and fluid modernity have caught us by surprise. We can require objectivity only from public media which, however, are only a small facet of the whole media spectrum. Since we are used to a quality verified reporting, we do not want to get to terms with the fact that there are many more news reports, as much as they are more superficial, simpler and shorter. If we do not want to write reports about ourselves, and issue our own newspaper, we must modify our media statements. First and foremost we must be more concise, precise and more explicit. We have to take into consideration that no-one will read dozens of pages in order to understand the gist of the problem. In short, we must begin with ourselves!

This conference will undoubtedly offer many different views of the relation between the court decision and its presentation in the media. I look very much forward to the discussion because the issue is very important, burning and not yet fully grasped. On the other hand, I want to point out that courts, including the Constitutional Court, are here to judge, protect rights and provide justice. Their task is neither media engineering and establishing public relations nor waging wars with journalists on who should say or write what, or who should clear up any misunderstanding.

The solution is a dialogue which has three stages: a court decision, its media processing, and adoption by the public. There will always have to be somebody between the court and the reader who will translate, simplify, smooth out and clarify the heavy legal form of information. Therefore, we should not be angry with journalists for spoiling our work, but on the contrary, we should help them seek the way; help them understand, interpret, and pass on our work. Without this dialogue and mutual understanding, a fair process will live in a glass tower, cut from everyday life.

More than ninety years ago, Karel Čapek aptly noted that „to write for newspapers means especially to have a relationship to everything that exists; to find a keen, direct, democratic interest in the entire reality without intellectual pomp.“

In conclusion I wish to quote Ortega Y Gasset: „A clear speech is a politeness worth a philosopher“.

Thank you for your attention.