Lasso sends freedom of expression bill to Ecuador’s Assembly to end ‘gag law’

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Ecuador’s new president, Guillermo Lasso, sent this Tuesday to the National Assembly his promised project to repeal the 2013 “Communication Law” passed by the then ruling government, which was considered a “gag law”

Sent to the head of the legislative branch, Guadalupe Llori, the bill entered today with 13 sheets of annex in which the Presidency sets out the reasons for the “discussion and approval” of the bill by the deputies.

“I hope that the National Assembly will give urgent procedure so that we return to live in full freedom in Ecuador,” said the president, according to a statement.

He asserts that the bill has been drafted in accordance “with international principles of freedom of expression such as the Declaration of Chapultepec and the Declaration of Human Rights of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights” and seeks to “guarantee that criminal law will never again be used to prosecute controversies arising from free expression.”

He also states that the new regulation “proposes to repeal the Communication Law except for the articles that promote national production in advertising, regulation of state propaganda and the radio electric spectrum regime,” and “strengthens the protection of the inviolability of personal communications and repeals the crime of slander and the contravention of acts detrimental to honor.”

With this, Lasso fulfills one of his electoral promises to put an end to that Correa’s law, popularly known as the “LOC of 2013”, which stipulated severe punishments against the media and limitations on freedom of expression.

Media, local, and even international organizations have always considered that law as a “gag law” that prevented the free development of freedom of expression in the country, and put numerous media on the ropes over the years with severe fines.

On Sunday, the night before his investiture, Lasso already announced in a forum organized by the International Freedom Foundation, presided by writer Mario Vargas Llosa, that this would be the first bill he would send to the Assembly.

“The executive decree that repeals the regulation to the gag law of Correism is ready. I will send to the National Assembly the new draft of Ecuador’s freedom of expression law, there is an asset, the most important, and that I will draft it myself,” said the new president.

He further assured that he wanted this to be “a symbol of the change, of course, we have been following”, as well as the next appointment as consul general in Miami of an Ecuadorian journalist persecuted by previous president Correa since 2007.