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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,...

On 17 February 2011 the General Court of the European Union issued its ruling in cases T-385/07 and T-68/08 (FIFA v Commission) and case T-55/08 (UEFA v Commission). The cases involved the list of events of major importance for society submitted by the United Kingdom and Belgium to the Commission. The two organisations sought to annul the approving decision of the Commission. Article 3a(1) of the Television without Frontiers Directive (now replaced by Article 14 of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive) allows Member States to prohibit the exclusive broadcasting of events they judge to be of...

Until recently, advertising for political parties was banned on audiovisual media services in the French-speaking Community of Belgium. The first sentence of the first paragraph of Article 12 of the Decree by the French-speaking Community of 27 February 2003 on broadcasting (which has since become the Decree of 26 March 2009 on audiovisual media services) provides that “neither political parties nor organisations representative of employers and workers may be the subject of commercial communication”. This provision was cancelled by the Constitutional Court on 22 December 2010 in response to an...