Two researches worked on the case study of the civil and defamation cases against media and journalists heard by the Mongolian courts in 2009.  We could not access to the cases heard in 2010 because the materials were not arrived in the Capital City Court Archive, so the researchers reviewed the archival documents of nine Ulaanbaatar district courts and materials of 21 aimag courts.

The Civil Law of Mongolia protects the person’s honour, dignity and reputation and libel and insult are subject to the Criminal Code of Mongolia.

In 2009, the Mongolian courts heard and took decisions on in total of 45 civil and criminal defamation cases. Only criminal defamation case was brought to the court. 17 cases were filed against media and journalists.  No criminal defamation cases launched against media, but the only criminal case was filed on the base of information distributed through media. 

82.4 percent of the cases were heard by Ulaanbaatar courts. Globe International has been conducting the similar studies starting from 1999 and the number of the defamation cases against media and journalists has dropped in 2009 by 8 compare to 2008.

Years		Civil cases		Criminal cases
	Total	Against   media	Total	Against   media
1999	30	-	3	-
2000	39	-	-	-
2001	31	11	4	-
2002	44	37	2	2
2003	28	18	1	1
2004	40	40	1	1
2005	29	25	1	1
2006	36	31	3	3
2007	33	33	-	-
2008	39	25	5	5
2009	45	17	1	-
Total	394	237	21	13

In 2009, in 17.6 percent of the cases media won and 35.3 percent- lost. The media and plaintiffs reconciled in the remaining portion or nearly half of the cases (47.1 percent).

In 73 percent of the cases, the plaintiffs were the public officials and public institutions. Indeed, the journalists face legal problems when they criticize the government officials or government agencies. Deflation legislation is still used by the authorities as censorship tool.