Adam Catzavelos is back in the country, and he’s headed for court next week.

On Tuesday, he will appear in the Randburg Magistrate’s Court on charges of crimen injuria, which is ‘the wilful injury to someone’s dignity caused by the use of obscene or racially offensive language or gestures’.

That’s the charge that Vicki Momberg was found guilty of.

Having run his mouth about “not one k****r in sight” during his holiday in Greece, Adam was hit with the charge by the EFF, and the South African Human Rights Commission was also looking into the matter at one point.

News24 spoke with Tarin Page, an associate at HJW Attorneys, who said that the chances that he could be successfully prosecuted for a racial slur were slim:

[Page] says essentially, in law, the rule is that the country where the offence is committed has the jurisdiction to prosecute.

“In this case, Greece does not have the same laws pertaining to racism as SA and therefore his racist rant is not considered a crime in Greece,” Page said.

However, Page says if such a racial slur was a crime in Greece, he could have been extradited to South Africa to be prosecuted here…

Page said if Catzavelos had recorded the video, which went viral while he was in South Africa, then there would be a possibility that he could be charged in terms of the Electronic Communications Act.

However, from the circumstances, it appears that the video was recorded and posted in Greece, she added.

Page did add that the fact that the video was seen around the world, however, could provide an opportunity for this to be an exception to the general rule.

Perhaps that’s why René Koraan, a senior lecturer at the law faculty of North West University, reckons Adam could be taken down:

[She] was of the view that it didn’t matter that Catzavelos was out of the country when he used the k-word; nor whether it might not be an offence in that country…

“It comes down to domicile (place of residence), so jurisdiction will be in South Africa. And if you look at the word itself, I don’t think [Catzavelos] was referring to any other group of people in any other place or country.”

To further complicate matters, there’s the issue of how the video came to be in the public domain. Lawyer and social media expert Emma Sadleir says that Catzavelos could argue that his privacy was infringed upon, when the video he sent via WhatsApp was made public.

In the same vein, privacy infringement can be defended by saying that something is in the public’s interest. Sadleir says that “there’s a lot of public interest in rooting out racism”.

I’m sure that Adam will come armed with a knowledgable legal team, and there could be quite a battle ahead.

As we said yesterday, prepare yourself for a full-blown media circus.

[source:news24]