In wartime, the laws of war apply. You cannot respond to a mobilization order by saying that if there is no Wi-Fi in the forest, you are not going to fight, or ask to postpone military service because you have already booked a room at a spa for the same period. That should be obvious even to a hedgehog — and I do not mean those who participated in the military exercise of the same name, but rather the general public.

Journalists also understand well that during war or a state of emergency, information cannot be published as freely as in peacetime and that extreme care must be taken in considering whether and how published material could harm Estonia. It is understandable that the state must have appropriate mechanisms in place to prevent malicious behavior in such circumstances. As always, the devil is in the details — namely, what those mechanisms are.

The provisions of the Civil Crisis and National Defense Act adopted in early June that have generated the most attention allow the Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority, the Police and Border Guard Board, the Internal Security Service and the Estonian Defense Forces to partially or fully prohibit the provision of media services and the publication of media outlets during a state of emergency or wartime if doing so is necessary to address the emergency or wartime situation.

True, the government must first authorize the agencies or the Defense Forces to do so, but the law leaves rather vague what can actually be done under that authorization.

Shutting down a media outlet is the most radical form of prior censorship. It means that not only potentially harmful content cannot be published, but neither can information that might help residents cope with an already difficult emergency situation in their daily lives, such as information about food availability, changes in electricity supply and safe or dangerous areas.

Under the law, the publication of a media outlet may be prohibited only to the extent that it threatens public order, national security or the provision of military defense. In practice, however, it is difficult to see how only part of a newspaper could be shut down.

Closing a media outlet is, above all, a punitive measure, even though under the law it is supposed to be preventive. Institutions authorized to censor would generally have no way of foreseeing the publication of harmful information other than by sending an army of censors into every newsroom, which would be rather difficult to implement in practice, as Kaarel Tarand recently noted.

The biggest question mark surrounding the new law, however, is probably accountability. Even until now, it has been possible to shut down Estonian media outlets during wartime, but only by order of the government, the prime minister or the responsible minister.

But if the government authorizes an agency or the Defense Forces to decide matters affecting press freedom, who actually makes the decision? It is no longer the government, from which the media can later demand answers and which voters can hold accountable at the ballot box.

Does the decision fall to the agency's director or the commander of the Defense Forces? A department head? A captain? A lieutenant? A sergeant? From whom should explanations be demanded as to whether the closure of a newspaper, news portal or television channel was genuinely prompted by a threat to national defense or instead by a corruption story that had come too close to the decision-maker? Who would determine whether the closure was justified and lawful when it does not even require court approval?

Because the Riigikogu passed the law in question on June 2, while I was attending the World News Media Congress and learning about the latest trends in journalism, I asked several colleagues whether media outlets could be shut down just as easily in their home countries. The answers did little credit to Estonia, which ranks third in the world on the press freedom index.

In Poland, where the previous Law and Justice government initiated more than a hundred SLAPP suits against Gazeta Wyborcza alone, the country's largest independent newspaper, the party — which otherwise often tested the boundaries of the rule of law — never introduced such a system.

In Hungary, where a state of emergency had been in force since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, one very similar to what would constitute a state of emergency here, even Viktor Orbán, Europe's champion in hostility toward the free press, did not have the power to shut down media outlets. Even in Ukraine, where a full-scale war is underway and entirely understandable restrictions have been imposed on the publication of militarily significant information, the government does not have the authority to completely prohibit the operation of media outlets.

So why do we now have such powers here, in a country that has long sat at the top of press freedom rankings and where public trust in the media is significantly higher than in most other countries? Is there really an attempt from several different directions — through the privatization of Eesti Post, increasing the number of members on ERR's supervisory board and allowing the concealment of ultimate beneficial owners — to exert greater control over the media?

There are additional small and large details that provide grounds for such speculation, but I personally do not believe there is some hidden hand behind them reaching for the unprotected throat of freedom of expression. Rather, in many cases, what once again shines through is superficiality and haste. Quite a few provisions in the 132-page law that prompted this article came as a complete surprise to members of the Riigikogu only when it was adopted, and not only the provisions concerning the media.

Because the Constitution clearly states that there is no censorship in Estonia, it is possible that, despite his recent defeat in the Supreme Court, the president will not rush to promulgate the Civil Crisis Act but will instead return it to parliament. Above all, however, I hope we never have to test the quality of this law in practice. But if we do, then a law designed for wartime must be drafted to the highest possible standard.

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