On 28 April 2026, the Verkhovna Rada passed draft bill No. 15150, an updated Civil Code, in the first reading. The authors present the document as a “fundamental recodification” of private law that took six years to complete. Yet media lawyers, investigative journalists, and human rights activists argue that this sprawling update contains systemic threats to freedom of speech, anti-corruption journalism, and openness of public information. The Institute of Mass Information highlights 11 of the potential threats the new Civil Code poses to the media:

1. Article 295: Entitlement to response regardless of whether the reported information is true

One of the clauses that pose the most danger to journalism is in Acricle 295: enshrining the “right to respond” of any person whose personal rights were violated “as a result of information being reported.”

The critical nuance is Clause 5, Article 295 of the draft Code:

“The right to respond is to be complied with regardless of whether the information the reporting of which violated the person’s rights is true.”

This means that even if a media outlet published completely true information (e.g. confirmed facts of corruption, real offenses), the subject of their reporting will have the right to demand that their response be published in a follow-up.

Clause 7 adds to this mechanism:

“Any omissions or other alterations to the response made without the responder’s consent are prohibited.”

Meaning, the news outlet would have to publish responses by anyone mentioned in their reporting in full, unedited. On paper, the excercise of the right to respond is regulated by Article 43 of the Law on Media, which contains clear requirements in terms of contacting a media outlet with a demand to publish a response, grounds for refusal, the length and content of the response, etc. However, this article only applies to media outlets, while any person with a social media account would have to comply with demands to share the response by anyone mentioned in their posts.

The draft Civil Code does not limit the length of the response, one can not refuse to publish it, and the clause does not account for the truthfulness of the reported information. If the author of an article refuses to publish a response that is irrelevant to the article or exceeds it in length, they may be sued for personal rights violation: a scenario that puts the journalist at a disadvantage by default.

“This would no longer be a matter of balancing rights but legally enshrined spam that the media would have to publish with their own hands. Imagine if any mention of a politician in the media was followed with another (obviously complimentary) column by their press office. The media would cease to be an oversight tool and become a notice board for those whom journalists are meant to watch over. The purpose of journalism is not to serve the reputation needs of those reported on but to provide society with verified and important information,” believes Institute of Mass Information director Oksana Romaniuk.

The proposed version of the clause on the right to respond will have an immediate chilling effect as journalists will start avoiding contentious topics not because they doubt their evidence but due to the risk of receiving a legal demand to publish an unregulated response by those mentioned in their material. This is far from being an anti-defamation mechanism: it is a tool that may ruin journalism and seriously undermine the social contract in the country.

2. Article 294: Presumption of innocence vs. journalism

Clause 3 of the new version of Article 294 “The right to refutation” contains an entirely new norm:

“The reported information may not violate presumption of innocence.”

This clause means that any information that goes against presumption of innocence is to be automatically declared misleading. It was included in the previous version of the draft Civil Code and has been somewhat edited following widespread criticism and media lawyers communicating clearly that such clauses are unacceptable. Yet, evidently, full removal of the presumption of innocence clause was not achieved. It remained in an altered but judicially significant version.

To comply with the ban, journalists may need to wait for years for court rulings to enter into effect before reporting on an offense and its perpetrator. Otherwise a journalist writing that “official A. is suspected of embezzling budget funds” may be sued for allegedly violating presumption of innocence. After all, the Code offers no definition of such violations, leaving it to the court’s discretion.

3. Article 298: Whistleblower protection gone

The current version of the Code’s article on the right to compensation of damage includes an important exemption: a whistleblower is exempted from liability for “unintentionally reporting false information about potential corruption-related offenses.”

The proposed new version of Article 298, “The right to compensation of property damage inflicted through violation of personal rights” lifts this protection entirely. Now the damage is to be compensated “in full”, with no special protections for sources who reported corruption in good faith but erred in the details.

This effectively means that if a journalist’s source is a whistleblower who reported corruption in good faith, but some of the details proved to be inaccurate, the person reported on may demand full compensation. This complicates the protection of journalistic sources, undermines the journalist’s trust in their own sources and weakens the position of those reporting insider information on abuses of office.

4. Article 328: The vaguely defined “right to obscurity”

The new Article 328 enshrines a “right to obscurity”: an individual may demand “the removal, anonymisation, deletion of information about them from general access sources” and for their name to be de-indexed if information is “outdated, incomplete, or no longer of public interest.“

While Clause 3 does list some exemptions (freedom of expression, archival value, public figures in their official capacity), they are vaguely formulated and cite a future law: “in cases stipulated by law.” Until there is such law, there is no mechanism to protect journalism from “right to obscurity” claims.

As a result, an official convicted of corruption several years ago may claim that information about them is no longer of public interest and demand that archive media coverage of them be deleted and their name be de-indexed by search engines. Whether a piece of reporting (or, specifically, an individual’s personal information featured in it) is necessary to excercise one’s freedom of opinion or expression is an issue that judicial practice is bound to offer many answers to.

5. Articles 345 and 353: “Digital privacy” for businesses weaponised against OSINT and investigations

The draft Code introduces a concept unprecedented in global practice: “a legal entity’s digital privacy.”

Article 345 guarantees businesses’ right to “their own digital image” (e.g. digital accounts, social media profiles, e-governance systems) and their right to “demand correction, limits on distribution, or takedown of inaccurate information regarding their digital image.”

Article 353 goes even further:

“Data related to a legal entity’s digital image may only be processed with the entity’s consent and in compliance with the law.”

It also grants companies the right to “digital private space” covering “metadata, online activity history, searh queries, web resources visited, data generated by devices . . . other digital data that amount to a legal entity’s private space (digital privacy) in a digital environment.”

OSINT researchers and investigative journalists use open digital data about businesses to discover corruption ties and “the Russian trace”. The new clauses may allow companies to proclaim such “data processing” illegal, i.e. done without their consent.

Moreover, excersised en masse, this right will complicate any pre-agreement counterparty vetting. Potentially, this may lead to dubious companies clearing up their digital image and digital space to continue their operations at all costs. Results would include cancelled supplies, delayed payments, financial monitoring checks, companies being listed as high-risk, failed VAT recoveries, etc.

6. Article 352: Secrecy of correspondence for legal entities — a shield for corporate abuses

Article 351 grants legal entities the right to “secrecy of correspondence via mail and e-mail, telephone conversations, private messages in messenger applications and on social media platforms.”

Clause 2:

“Correspondence may only be published with the consent of the person sending the message(s) in question and of the person receiving it (them) unless otherwise stipulated by law.”

Publishing leaked corporate correspondence is a classic tool of anti-corruption journalism and investigative journalism. The new clause provides grounds for lawsuits against news outlets that publish companies’ or state bodies’ internal correspondence even if the correspondence provides evidence of crimes or corruption.

The articles on legal entities’ digital rights and secrecy of correspondence could have been made somewhat less problematic very simply: by excluding public law entities (state and local self-government bodies) from these rights, but the authors of the draft Code disregarded this proposal by media lawyers.

This clause’s biggest problem is that it mechanically extends the logic of an individual’s privacy to legal entities even though these two subject types are fundamentally different. An individual is entitled to privacy as part of their human dignity and autonomy, while a company or a state body is an organisational construct operating in an economic, administrative, or public environment and impacts the rights of other people, budget money, markets, state decisions, and public safety. If such structures are given a near-personal “secrecy of correspondence” with no clear public interest exemptions, this will serve to protect non-transparency, not privacy. This is especially alarming in the case of government bodies, communally-owned companies, state-owned companies, state procurement contractors, and businesses associated with sanctions-, corruption-, or Russia-related risks. In its current version, the clause may become a legal shield for corporate and government abuses, creating a “How dare you publish this?” risk. For journalism, and for society at large, this will mean a shift of focus from exposing offenses to criminalisation or deligitimisation of the very way they were documented.

7. Article 318: Ban on covert filming with no exception for journalism

Article 318, which deals with the right to “one’s own likeness and voice”, contains an exhaustive list of grounds for covert filming/recording:

“…only in cases stipulated by law and in the interests of national security, to prevent criminal offenses, in the interests of justice, and if a necessity to defend the rights of a specified individual and other persons arises.”

The listed grounds do not include investigative journalism or public interest. Covert filming, which investigators habitually use to document embezzlement and abuses of office, is now technically beyond what is allowed.

For comparison, Article 307 of the old Code did not mention journalism as an exception, either, but the new clause sets the finite list of grounds in stone, making an inclusive interpretation in the interests of journalism impossible.

8. Article 297: The court can order the destruction of all copies of a media, now including digital ones

The new version’s Article 297 preserves and expands the court’s right to confiscate all copies of a media:

“…if removing the offending content is impossible, to confiscate all copies (print run) of a media, edition, film, programme, etc. in order to destroy them.”

The new version expands this mechanism to include not just traditional print media and TV/radio programmes but digital content as well: “edition, film, programme, etc.” Even though enforcing such an order would be technically difficult in the case of online content, the threat itself is a potent tool of judicial pressure on media outlets pre-publication.

It is not just the literal “destruction of all copies” that makes this clause dangerous but the very logic of treating journalistic content as a commodity that the state may remove from public circulation. For printed press, this formulation sounds like a holdover from a bygone era, but expanding it to include digital content creates a different level of risk altogether.

What is especially dangerous is that the very likelihood of such a verdict may work preventively. Realising the risk of their material being fully erased, news outlets will begin to avoid topics that involve persons with enough resources to exert judicial pressure on them. Not just specific articles, but society’s right to access important information is threatened as a result.

9. Article 336: Digital personal space and “processing data”

The new Article 336 stipulates:

“Processing data pertaining to an individual’s digital image, their personal digital notes, digital correspondence is only allowed with the individual’s consent and in compliance with the law.”

Interpreted broadly, “processing data” may mean any effort to gather, systematise, or publish information about a person taken from open digital sources (even state registers), which would make such efforts qualifiable as offenses. This would potentially put journalists using publicly available data to compile dossiers on officials into a legal risk zone.

Personal data protection should not be regulated by the Civil Code, since it comes with a whole range of exceptions and nuances of application that have to be thoroughly outlined in a separate specialised bill, which is being drafted right now. Media lawyers have communicated this to the new Civil Code’s authors, but their remarks were not taken into account.

10. Article 6: “Boni mores” — a judge’s moral convictions as the source of justice

Article 6 introduces the notion of “boni mores” as the basic principle regulating all private relations:

“Boni mores is the totality of moral conventions and principles, ethical standards of behaviour, and generally accepted ideas about proper behaviour that are established in society.”

This notion is ever-present in the new Code. Article 318 says: filming or taking a picture of a person’s likeness is allowed “unless it is [. . .] contra bonos mores.” A judge who believes that an investigation was “unethical” may apply this idea to curtail reporting — with no clear limitations outlined in the law.

Essentially, legal assessment of reporting becomes a matter of a specific judge’s personal morals and not of the law. It is especially dangerous for the media, since journalism is often uncomfortable, “obscene”, and a source of conflict to those it exposes. Investigating corruption, reporting inconvenient facts, showing officials’ luxurious lifestyles in wartime, revealing businesses’ ties to Russia — all these may be deemed “contra bonos mores”, “unethical”, “aggressive”, or “improper behaviour” by someone. But in a democratic society journalism should be regulated not by a judge’s aesthetic or moral convictions but by clear criteria such as legality of methods, accuracy of information, relevance to public interest, whether intrusion of privacy was justified, etc.

11. A new threat (Articles 17 and 26): Preventive court bans on publication

These two provisions together open a fundamentally new opportunity of exerting pressure on the media.

Article 17 allows defending rights not only after they were violated, but also if there is a risk of violation:

“…ceasing behaviour that violates rights, creates a risk of such violation…”

Article 25 introduces “preventive expenses”: “the expenses a person incurred with the aim of preventing the risk of property damage being inflicted on them.”

Together, these clauses allow a person featured in an investigation in progress go to court before the investigation is released and demand it be banned, citing “the risk” of their personal rights being violated. And even make the defendant pay their lawyers’ fee as “preventive expenses”. Of all that the new Civil Code allows, these provisions are closest to a preventive censorship mechanism.

The draft bill has only been passed in the first reading. The petition asking the President to prevent the current version of the Code from being fully approved was signed by over 25 thousand people in less than 24 hours. The specialised committee and MPs still have time to either kill the draft bill as a whole or rework it — thoroughly and with input from civil society representatives.

The key media regulation-related changes that the document needs include:

  • Exemptions for the media in Articles 294–295 and 318: public interest reporting should be explicitly protected from applying the “right to respond” clauses and filming restrictions.
  • The “right to respond” (Article 295) should be limited to cases when the reported information was inaccurate or significantly incomplete.
  • The clauses on the “digital privacy” of legal entities in Articles 345 and 353 should be removed or rewritten: businesses should not enjoy the same rights as individuals.
  • Protections for open data should be added by explicitly stipulating that using public registers and open source data for journalism is not a violation of a legal entity’s “digital image”.
  • Whistleblower protection against good faith errors should be restored (by adding back the exemption in the previous version of Article 280).
  • Preventive court bans on publication should be outlawed if the information is related to socially important issues.
  • The notion of “boni mores” should be clearly defined in a way that prevents the application of this criterium in legal assessment of reporting and editorial decisions.

If these changes, at least, are not made, Ukraine will end up with a Civil Code that provides public figures and companies with an unprecedented legal arsenal to crack down on inconvenient investigations and journalism as a whole — at a time when the country needs them most.