A newsstand in the Hamra district of Beirut, in 2019. (Credit: AFP archive photo)
It was slipped in almost unnoticed, hidden amongst a batch of “good news.” On Tuesday, Lebanon’s Parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, placing Lebanon among nations that uphold the sanctity of human life. It also modernized the media law, introducing a number of important advances, including the creation of an independent media regulatory authority and greater legal recognition for news websites.Yet one provision casts a shadow over these achievements: Article 104 of the media law opens the door to journalists being imprisoned, bringing an end to a Lebanese exception in the Middle East.Lebanon was once imagined as an island of freedom in an overly austere Middle East — a bastion of liberalism and coexistence, bordered to the east by authoritarian socialism and to the south by a state of ethnic segregation. It was here, then,...
It was slipped in almost unnoticed, hidden amongst a batch of “good news.” On Tuesday, Lebanon’s Parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, placing Lebanon among nations that uphold the sanctity of human life. It also modernized the media law, introducing a number of important advances, including the creation of an independent media regulatory authority and greater legal recognition for news websites.Yet one provision casts a shadow over these achievements: Article 104 of the media law opens the door to journalists being imprisoned, bringing an end to a Lebanese exception in the Middle East.Lebanon was once imagined as an island of freedom in an overly austere Middle East — a bastion of liberalism and coexistence, bordered to the east by authoritarian socialism and to the south by a state of ethnic segregation. It was here,...
