Maria Ressa and the danger of making an old article newly criminal

A Manila court convicted Maria Ressa and former Rappler researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr of cyber libel on 15 June 2020 over an article first published in May 2012. The Cybercrime Prevention Act became law four months later.

The prosecution crossed that date problem by treating a 2014 correction of a typographical error as republication. The trial court accepted the argument. Its judgment turned a minor edit into a new act carrying criminal liability under a law that did not exist when the reporting first appeared.

The case was not a licence for journalists to publish false statements. Libel law already offered a remedy. The public-interest question was whether a digital archive could become a fresh criminal offence each time a correction was made, and whether that interpretation was compatible with the prohibition on retroactive punishment.

The International Commission of Jurists said the conviction damaged media freedom and rested on a retroactive application of criminal law. The Court of Appeals later upheld the conviction. The legal dispute is recorded in the judgments; the wider warning sits in every newsroom archive. Corrections should reduce harm. A rule that makes correction the trigger for prosecution gives publishers a reason not to correct at all.