52 institutions and persons are authorized to request information from the Judiciary’s Record of Convicted Felons; and d) the inclusion of Mr. Mauricio Herrera Ulloa’s name in the Judiciary’s Record of Convicted Felons is also an unlawful mechanism for restricting freedom of expression and hence a violation of Article 13 of the American Convention. 101(4) With regard to the civil damages that both journalist Mauricio Herrera Ulloa and the newspaper “La Nación”, represented by Mr. Vargas Rohrmoser, were ordered to pay, the Commission argued that: a) making it a crime to reproduce published news reports concerning the conduct of a public official can have the effect of causing journalists to engage in self-censorship, which obstructs the free exchange and flow of information, ideas and opinions; b) if it is disproportionate or fails to serve the pressing social need that would otherwise justify it, the subsequent liability imposed in a concrete case would be a clear violation of Article 13 of the American Convention; c) legal actions brought by public officials or private persons voluntarily involved in public affairs, claiming defamation, calumny and insult, should be matters for civil –not criminal- courts, applying the standard of actual malice, where it is the alleged aggrieved party who must bear the burden of proving that the social communicator intended to inflict harm or acted with full knowledge that he was spreading false information; d) Mr. Przedborski, Costa Rican honorary consul, had an influential role representing Costa Rican society abroad, so that Costa Rica’s citizens had a “substantial and legitimate interest” in knowing how he comported himself in performing his functions; and e) inasmuch as Costa Rica has offered no convincing arguments to show that there was manifest mens rea in the publication of the various disputed articles, no criminal or civil liabilities can be imposed on Mr. Mauricio Herrera Ulloa as the author of those allegedly prejudicial articles, or on the newspaper business that ran the articles, or on Mr. Vargas Rohrmoser as the newspaper’s legal representative. Consequently, the civil damages ordered as a result of the criminal action are also a violation of Article 13 of the American Convention. 101(5) With regard to the order to take down the existing link at the “La Nación Digital” website between the surname Przedborski and Mr. Mauricio Herrera Ulloa’s articles that were the cause of the criminal complaint and civil suit, and the order to establish a link between those articles and the “Now, Therefore” portion of the judgment of conviction, the Commission argued that: a) the order to eliminate the existing link constitutes interference and a form of prior censorship of the news by the State, in violation of Article 13 of the Convention. The order to create another link with the operative part of the guilty verdict is a restriction on freedom of expression, as it dictates what