Italian paper pays damages after labelling Palestine rights advocate a ‘terrorist’

Italian newspaper Il Corriere Della Sera has been ordered to pay €15,000 in damages to Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Palestinian rights group Al-Haq, for falsely accusing him in 2021 of being a terrorist and murderer.

In a press release published this week, Al-Haq said the paper had published the claims days after Jabarin was invited to join a hearing at the Chamber of Deputies in the Italian Parliament on 20 December 2021 following Israel’s designation of Palestinian NGOs as ‘terrorist organisations’.

Two days after the hearing, Il Corriere della Sera published an article “containing false and defamatory statements” labelling Jabarin a “terrorist”. Additionally, “the newspapers omitted essential contextual information around Israel’s targeted designation of six Palestinian civil society organisations as ‘terror organisations’, thereby infringing on the readers’ right to access free and impartial information.”

After being summoned to court, the paper accepted a settlement agreement, which included compensating Jabarin for “reputational” damage suffered and publishing an article retracting the defamatory claims. However it failed to admit, in its article, that it was among those who had defamed the Palestinian rights advocate.

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