Last month AllSeeingEye ran with a story from the Croatian Times about a blogger who was sentenced for comments left on his blog by someone else. A co-conspirator of this blog who is well versed in matters legal gave some excellent advice both in person and in the comments on that post.

Anyway, there is an update on the story. From the Croatian Times:

Vukovar resident Damir Fintic, the first Croat who was supposed to go to jail for expressing opinions on his blog, will not have to do so after all. Fintic was sentenced to 20 days in jail for comments written by someone else on his blog criticizing former Vukovar Mayor Vladimir Stengl and his wife Dragica.

The Supreme Court, however, has dismissed the verdict against him with an explanation that Fintic was illegally sentenced and has sent the case back to the Vukovar court. Stengl pressed charges against Fintic and demanded a total of 250,000 kunas or 33,311 Euros in damages. Fintic decided to go to prison because he did not have that much money.

Fintic was accused according to the old law of 2005, which provides for fines or prison for calumny, but a new law in 2006 provided only for fines for calumny. The State Attorney’s Office had asked for the dismissal of his sentence. He was supposed to have checked himself into Osijek prison on 27 October.

Fintic expressed content with the Supreme Court decision. Croatian Journalists Association (HND) head Zdenko Duka said he was pleased that Croatia would not be the first European country to send a journalist to jail for comments on a blog.

So the issue hasn’t gone away but local law enforcement seems to be in a bit of a mess about the whole thing. Certainly this bears out the initial assessment by Peter on the original post here that the law used in this case was one not designed to cope with bloggers or blogging. The legal system needs to play catch-up with technology (as ususal) but this is not a situtation unique to Croatia….be careful out there, folks.