Bill No. 14057, registered in the parliament by a group of deputies on 21 September 2025, creates censorship risks and sets excessively strict requirements for the media, say Institute of Mass Information director Oksana Romaniuk, and the IMI lawyer Volodymyr Zelenchuk regarding the bill “On Amendments to the Civil Code of Ukraine With Regards to the Updates (Recodification) of the Placement of Book Two”.
Namely, the bill increases the likeliness of “prior censorship”, that is, enables the authorities to ban a piece of reporting even before it is published (including in online news outlets, social media, and other “web resources”). According to IMI experts, this is a classic example of prior restraint, which creates a threat of violation of Art. 10 of the Convention on Human Rights.
Furthermore, the bill proposes blocking access to material (such as suspending an online media page) as a measure of such “pre-censorship” and as a response to “violations of personal rights.” This may lead to excessive pressure on the media to take down content, as well as to increasing self-censorship and abuse of legal procedures by officials or corporations. “Such requirements should contain guarantees of proportionality, be targeted narrowly, and this should be a last resort: priority should be given to more democratic alternatives such as pre-trial settlement,” says Volodymyr Zelenchuk, a lawyer at the Institute of Mass Information.
Another very problematic aspect of the bill is expanding the right of refutation and the right of response in the media. This means that any mention of a person in the media grants this person the right to reply if, in their opinion, the media outlet violated their “personal rights.” The person in question need not even be mentioned by name: it is enough “that a specific person can be identified from the reporting or that they are included in the group of persons referred to in the reporting.” The right of reply is offered regardless of the reporter’s fault or even of whether the information affecting the personal rights is misleading or not.
“This will undoubtedly destroy editorial control, professional standards of journalism, and turn the media into mere microphone stands that will be obliged to give the floor to anyone who has been mentioned even in passing or indirectly, but who believes that the mention in the media violates his or her ‘personal rights.’ And this anyone will get the opportunity to impose his or her version of events even regarding a piece of reliable reporting. This poses huge threats to freedom of speech and journalism as a profession overall,” believes Oksana Romaniuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information.
“Obviously, the proposed amendments will give a stronger position to those who abuse the procedures for refuting inaccurate reporting and contesting defamation to defend themselves against well-founded allegations by journalists. Oddly enough, many officials and top corrupt officials exposed in journalistic stories rarely plead guilty and just as rarely get court sentences which would indicate compliance with the presumption of innocence. So high-quality journalistic investigations that become the basis for pre-trial investigations may also become such an extraordinary phenomenon,” says Volodymyr Zelenchuk.
On 23 September, the investigative project Bihus.info said that the bill proposes more severe liability for critical reporting and may put the very existence of investigative journalism at risk.
The journalists pointed out that the bill proposed to consider all information that is not enshrined in a court ruling as unreliable and to make subjective opinions punishable.
“What we have on the menu this time is making us unable to tell you about someone’s schemes before the court ruling, ‘moral damage’ compensation for value judgments (this is when someone doesn’t like how you talk about them, even if the facts are all true), and takedown of ‘outdated’ material — although it is not at all clear who will be determining the outdatedness,” Bihus.info said.
