The criminal law protection of honour through the ages: reflection on decriminalisation and non-prosecution of libel
Abstract
Human honour has always been one of the generally accepted high moral values, traditionally protected even at the level of criminal law. The Honour Protection Act from 1933 enshrined in the Czech lands several criminal offenses based on deplorable conduct against honour, among others libel, which remained in the catalogue of criminal offenses even after the adoption of the current Criminal Code in 2009.
The importance of honour as one of the legal goods within criminal offences is attested by its systematic placement into the second chapter of the special part of the Criminal Code, i.e. the chapter directly following crimes against life and health. Nevertheless, we have witnessed a trend of gradually withdrawing the criminal law protection of human honour in the last several years.
This is evidenced by the Chamber of Deputies' initiative aiming to abolish the crime of libel, the reluctant approach of several bodies active in the pre-trial proceedings if they are to react to a criminal complaint for this crime, and the conclusions of the Constitutional Court, according to whose current case law non-criminal legal means of protection should be used more than ever in these cases. In her contribution, the author presents arguments leading her to believe that the time to decriminalise the crime of libel has not yet come to pass and analyses selected foreign legal regulation, which enables the criminal law protection of honour and which at the same time meets the often mentioned requirement for increased activity of the parties to the proceedings in punishing offences of this kind.