THE PROFESSIONAL SECRET OF JOURNALISTS
The union intervenes

Mr. Georges Bourdon, general secretary of the Journalists' Union, has just sent, on behalf of the Union, the following letter to the Minister of the Navy and the Minister of Justice:
“Mr. Minister, The Union of Journalists cannot hide from you the extreme emotion caused by the judgment of the Cherbourg maritime court. With an incredible ignorance of the duties of the press, of the services it renders every day, throughout the territory, to public affairs, of the conditions in which it exercises a salutary mission which it derives from the nature of things as much as from its long tradition, rights finally which are the counterpart, this court has just condemned one of our colleagues guilty of having refused to denounce the sources of his information. And the justice of Cherbourg does not see what is unfair and paradoxical in the fact of punishing for refusal to testify the man whose disinterested revelations put it on the trail of abuses serious enough for she considered it necessary to open an investigation. “Such a sentence is intolerable for us. It is because it makes it impossible for us to exercise our profession and because it is contrary to the requirements of the public good. It is even more so because it punishes what we consider to be a professional virtue. “The Journalists’ Union has drawn up a Code of professional honor; it imposes respect on all its members; a disciplinary commission, which prides itself on functioning, when necessary, without weakness, ensures that it is observed. At the forefront of our moral obligations, we place that of secrecy, and he is not an honest man not to approve of us. If one of us fails to do so, he will be referred to the Disciplinary Commission and given the most serious penalty, that of removal, compounded by the publicity given to this removal, which is equivalent to his disqualification. “And so it is this same man, marked and rejected by his peers, with the approval of all honest people, in whom a court would recognize a good servant of civic duty! And the one in whom we honor fidelity to an essential principle of morality, it is him that the same court condemns! The contrast is so shocking that it leads to scandal and morality being on the side of journalists, not on the side of jurisprudence, it is jurisprudence which, for its own dignity, must give way.
“I therefore have the honor, Mr. Minister, to ask you, on behalf of the Journalists' Union, to ensure that the organs of the public prosecutor's office, on which your action is lawful, henceforth give, of article 378 of the Penal Code, with regard to our profession, an interpretation consistent with morality and common sense, observing in this, moreover, a judicial tradition of which it is singular that the commissioner-rapporteur of the maritime court of Cherbourg has deemed fit to escape. And we do not want to doubt that, if it appears necessary to you to clarify or supplement this article 378, the government will not hesitate to take, in this regard, before Parliament, the appropriate initiatives. “Please, etc..”

Paul Faure