Abstract

PUNIN LARREA, María Isabel  and  GARCIA-TORRES, Carlos. Previous Censorship in Ecuador: Página 12 Case and Journalistic Communication in Electoral Times. Rev. mex. opinión pública [online]. 2023, n.34, pp.171-190.  Epub Feb 05, 2024. ISSN 2448-4911.  https://doi.org/10.22201/fcpys.24484911e.2023.34.80577.

The processes of regulation and control in Ecuador have provoked a series of events linked to the right to freedom of expression and press. In this framework, the legal implications of the “prior censorship” established in article 18 of the LOC (2013) Communication Law in force in Ecuador are analyzed. Since then that law had several reforms, but this article is based only in the version effective in 2013, Take as a study reference the case known as Page 12, an unprecedented case in the country, which established sanctions for seven media outlets, all of them private, for the non-publication of a report published in Argentina and related to the investment in tax havens of the former presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso Mendoza. The article argues that the disparity between LOC (2013) and international instruments is given by the same purposes of the law, as well as by the definition and contents of the freedom of expression that it carries out in that normative compendium.

Keywords : Censorship; freedom of expression; journalism; right to communication; Ecuador.