Nasik Swami
SUVA (Fiji Times / Pacific Media Watch): High Court judge William Calanchini has found Fiji Times Limited, the owner of The Fiji Times, guilty of contempt of court.
Justice Calanchini also found the publisher at the time, Brian O'Flaherty, and the newspaper's editor, Fred Wesley, guilty of contempt.
The case concerned a sports article about former Fiji Football Association president Dr Muhammad Smashed-Dean Sahu Khan who had been found guilty of professional misconduct by the Fiji Independent Legal Services Commissioner and struck off the roll of lawyers in Fiji.
The article was about his continued role at that time with the Oceania Football Confederation.
It was originally published in a New Zealand newspaper and reprinted in The Fiji Times on 7 November 2011.
In his judgment, Justice Calanchini said the publication of words attributed to Oceania Football Confederation secretary Tai Nicholas amounted to a contempt of court because a "fair minded and reasonable person reading those words would conclude that the words must mean that those who claim to be performing judicial functions in Fiji are not in fact a judiciary at all".
He said the words understood in this way represented a "real risk to the administration of justice in Fiji by undermining the authority, integrity and impartiality of the court and the judiciary".
Justice Calanchini found O'Flaherty and Wesley were also legally liable as publisher and editor according to strict liability principles even though neither was on duty on the day the article was prepared for publication.
He said The Fiji Times' systems for avoiding breaches of the law "at the time was either ineffective, unsupervised or not sufficiently monitored".
He said "in my judgement, whatever the reason, the responsibility for the publication of the material must be borne by the both publisher and the editor".
Fiji Times Limited was represented by QC Julian Miles while acting Solicitor-General Sharvada Sharma represented the Attorney-General.
The court is to set a date for mitigation before sentencing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Pacific Media Watch
