ORDER OF THE INTER-AMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS OF MAY 23, 2001 REQUEST FOR PROVISIONAL MEASURES OF THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MATTER OF THE REPUBLIC OF COSTA RICA THE LA NACIÓN NEWSPAPER CASE HAVING SEEN: 1. The communication of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter “the Commission” or “the Inter-American Commission”) of March 28, 2001, in which it submitted a request for provisional measures in favor of Mauricio Herrera Ulloa and Fernán Vargas Rohrmoser, respectively journalist and legal representative of the Costa Rican newspaper, La Nación, “for [the Court to request] the Republic of Costa Rica to protect the freedom of expression” of the said persons. The grounds for the Commission’s request were that: a) the journalist, Mauricio Herrera Ulloa, had been criminally convicted of four offenses in the sphere of libel, owing to articles published in the newspaper, La Nación, which reproduced what had been published in the European press concerning a “controversial” Costa Rican public official accredited by the Costa Rican foreign service to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna; b) the judgment of the Criminal Trial Court of the First Judicial Circuit of San José ordered: 40 days of fines at two thousand five hundred colones a day for each of the four offenses, for a total of one hundred and sixty days of fines and, in application of the rules for this type of proceeding, the penalty was reduced to three times the highest fine imposed, that is to one hundred and twenty days of fines, which would amount to three hundred thousand colones; the civil action for compensatory damages was declared admissible and Mauricio Herrera Ulloa and Periódico La Nación, S.A., represented by Fernán Vargas Rohrmoser, as the persons jointly liable, were condemned to pay sixty million colones for the non-pecuniary damage caused by the publications in the newspaper, La Nación, on May 19, 20 and 21 and December 13, 1995; publication of the operative paragraphs of the judgment in the same section of the newspaper, La Nación, that is, “El País”, and with the same typeface as the articles that were the subject of the dispute, under the responsibility of Mauricio Herrera Ulloa, as the person responsible for the unlawful acts that were committed; that La Nación S.A. withdraw the link that existed between the last name Przedborski and the disputed articles in La Nación Digital on Internet, and that it establish a link between those articles and the operative paragraphs of the judgment. Furthermore, the judgment condemned the defendants to pay one thousand colones towards the procedural costs and the sum of three million eight hundred and ten thousand colones for personal costs; c) the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice admitted the appeal for annulment filed against the judgment of the Criminal Trial Court of the First Judicial Circuit of San José, but rejected this appeal and, in a judgment of January 24, 2001, confirmed the decision that had been appealed;