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In a judgment of 29 March 2011 the European Court found a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the case Radio-télévision belge de la communauté française (RTBF) v Belgium. The case concerned an interim injunction ordered by an urgent-applications judge against the RTBF, preventing the broadcasting of a programme on medical errors and patients’ rights. The injunction prohibited the broadcasting of the programme until a final court decision in a dispute between a doctor named in the programme and the RTBF. As the injunction constituted...

On 26 January 2011 a bill intended to achieve better protection of cultural creations on the Internet was formally proposed. The proposers (members of the Mouvement Réformateur (MR), a liberal party from French-speaking Belgium), emphasising the fundamental importance of cultural creations for every society and highlighting the danger represented by the activity of illegal downloading, stress the need for an appropriate balance between protection for cultural creations and respect for individual liberties. The system proposed is principally built on five pillars. Firstly, the proposal suggests...

The European Commission has finished the preliminary analysis of the measures implementing the Audiovisual Media Services (AVMS) Directive into national law notified by 16 Member States: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. Subsequently, the European Commission has sent fact-finding letters to these states inquiring about these implementing measures. The Commission is thus seeking to ensure that all provisions of the AVMS Directive have been correctly transposed into...

The Flemish commercial broadcaster VMMa’s reality tv programme “My Restaurant” was invaded by three undercover journalists from the news website Clint.be. In this programme five couples are followed throughout their attempts to set up a successful restaurant business. One of these couples organised solicitations in order to recruit staff, in which ten journalists of the news website participated without revealing their journalistic capacity. Three of them were selected. Later on, they revealed the results of their undercover actions through emails and also by way of reports on their website. In...

As part of the television information programme “Panorama”, a report covering the illegal trade of antiques from Afghanistan, as well as how this trade is indirectly funding the Taliban, was transmitted on 6 September 2009 by the Flemish public broadcaster (VRT). For the report, a collector was videotaped with a hidden camera in his private home. This man owns a large collection of works of art, from Afghanistan and other places, and, while answering their questions, he revealed some of these to the journalists, who were impersonating interested students. The collector’s face had been blurred,...