One Lithuanian journalist has hit the limits of press freedom
 
Freedom of the press is an important right in Europe, but not every government welcomes it. In Lithuania, a journalist who wrote critically of the KGB, was found guilty of libel and sent to jail.
 
Gintaras Visockas has worked as a journalist for 20 years. He's seen a lot in that time; among other posts, he was a correspondent in the North Caucasus during the first war in Chechnya. Since then, the 43-year-old has covered military topics.
One of the recurring themes in his current publication, an internet newspaper called "Slaptai" ("Secret"), is the closeness of Lithuanian politicians to the old secret police of the Soviet Union, the KGB. Recently, an article Visockas wrote about the former presidential candidate Ceslovas Jezerkas got the journalist into hot water. Jezerkas was previously an officer in the Soviet army, and eventually became a general. Visockas wrote that he participated in martial arts.
 

Long defunct, the KGB still wields influence
"I said in my article that in the Soviet Union, all the talented martial artists were controlled by the all-powerful KGB. I never wrote that Jezerkas worked for the KGB. I wrote 'controlled,'" said Visockas. "We can look in any dictionary and see that there is a big difference between these two words. The KGB controlled everything back then, not just martial artists but journalists and chess players, too."
 
A court in Vilnius saw things differently, though, and allowed Jezerkas to file a libel suit in 2009. The court ruled that "the average reader" would take away the impression that Jezerkas had worked for the KGB if they read Visockas' article. Visockas was sentenced to a 10,000 euro ($14,200) fine. He couldn't pay the money and had to spend 40 days in jail.
 
'We're not free'
Dainius Radzevicius, the head of the Lithuanian journalists' union, says this decision by the court is indicative of the situation for many journalists in the country...
 
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