Will it be possible to claim 2 million for an opinion?
The chances of a lawsuit by Vasily Andreev against Artemy Lebedev for were assessed by the head of the Chelyabinsk law firm "Legal Dialect" Nadezhda Semanova. There is no legal basis for his satisfaction, the expert believes, since the blogger did not say anything about the entrepreneur personally or about his agency.
"The defendant's words are a value judgment on the social institution of marriage, and not statements of fact that can be verified as true, and do not contain defamatory information about the plaintiff himself. This type of information is not subject to judicial protection, she emphasized. - The words about "ugly forms" refer to marriage as a phenomenon that it expresses, and does not refer to a person. The spreading of false facts about oneself is not disputed and does not require a refutation - and this denies the claim the only basis on which freedom of thought and speech can be built, meaning that a public expression of a person's attitude to a subject of social significance means bringing civil liability for the mere expression of a similar opinion.
Nadezhda Semanova concluded that the final assessment of the application will be given by the court.