Journalism student in Brazil is convicted to pay R$ 16 thousand due to comment made in his blog

The blogger and journalism student Emílio Moreno da Silva Neto, 33, was convicted by the Justice of the Brazilian State of Ceará to pay R$ 16 thousand due to a comment made in his blog.

Resident in Fortaleza, Neto received, in 21 november, a notification of property seizure with the goal to pay the sum that, with indexation, reaches the value of up to R$ 20,7 thousand. “I have no property, I am a student of journalism and live with my parents”, says Neto.

The case began in march, when the student posted a text in his blog in which he commented the lack of repercussion the local media gave to a fight between two students in Colégio Santa Cecília, a traditional private school in Fortaleza.

An anonymous viewer wrote a comment insulting the director of the college, the nun Eulália Maria Wanderley de Lima, and also criticizing her performance dealing with the students´ conflict. This led the nun to issue a moral damage lawsuit against the blogger.

The decision regarding the case was delayed, since the nun did not attend to the first four hearings, always justifying her absence. In the fifth hearing, the nun was present, but Neto was absent and failed to present his arguments. “I got confused with the dates”, explains the student.

According to the news website G1, Neto has also lost the date to appeal against the decision. The student has changed his lawyer and now plans to try to cancel the court´s decision or change the fine´s amount.

Process
According to the nun´s lawyer, Helder Nascimento, issuing a lawsuit was the only alternative possible. He claims that one day after the text and the comment´s publication, his office asked Moreno to delete the comment and hand out information from the person who wrote it. Nevertheless, “The comment was deleted only 16 days later”, says the lawyer.

The owner of the blog, on the other hand, affirms that he deleted the comment as soon as he was approached by the lawyer, which happened only in may, about two months after the post. “I remember as it was yesterday: there were three calls in a week. In the second one, the comment was already gone”.

Neto says that right after the first phone call, he contacted the journalist´s syndicate from Ceará to ask for orientation whether he should or should not hand out information from the person responsible for the comment.

“I tried to reason in every moment. I thought it was better not to expose the nun or myself, but I had no answer regarding any possibility of retraction”, says the student. Nascimento insists that the blogger resisted in deleting the comment. “Due to the initial refusal, during 16 days there was damage to Eulália´s image”.

Responsibility
Neto claims to have handed out the information (name and e-mail) of the person responsible for the comment, but he later found out that it was all fake.

For the student, the bloggers in Brazil are “victims of a breech in Justice”, that makes it possible for them to be made responsible for comments in their blogs. “There is no specific legislation for the internet. The sentence was given convicting the blogger”.

]The lawyer disagrees. In his view, the case of Neto should not be treated as a rule. “In this specific situation, there was disrespect on the part of a blog owner, causing damage to Ms Eulália. This doesn´t mean, as it is being said in many blogs, that each blogger would be legally responsible for any comment in a blog. Neto´s delay [in deleting the comment] made him responsible”.

In Brazil there still is no specific legislation dealing with content production to the internet. “Since we haven´t got an appropriate legislation, there can be a problem for the freedom of expression. We can end up creating a fear for people to express themselves. Since the occurred, I moderate the site and have, in one side, fear of censoring someone and, on the other, fear of being legally charged”, says Neto.