Search results : 234

Since its installation in 1997, the Authorisation and Supervision Board of the regulatory body for the audiovisual sector (Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA)) of the French-speaking Community had been very sparing in its use of the power to sanction which it holds by virtue of the Decree of 24 July 1997; only two - minorsanctions had been imposed in two and a half years, one against a radio station which had changed its broadcasting frequency without authorisation, and the other against RTL-TVI for broadcasting violent images during a news broadcast. In the space of just over one month, on...

On 2 February 2000 the Court of Arbitration delivered a judgment in a case on broadcasting law in Belgium. The Arbitration Court is a federal high Court with a competence similar to a constitutional court. The case concerns the current broadcasting legislation in the Flemish Community according to which radio frequencies for private broadcasters are only available for local and metropolitan radio stations, while all radio frequencies for regional or national broadcasting are exclusively available for the public broadcasting organisation VRT and its radio networks. Regional or national private radio...

On 22 December 1999, the regional criminal court in Brussels applied for the first time the act of 30 July 1981 that makes it a criminal offence to include racist or xenophobic comments in texts circulated on the Internet. W.E., a civil servant, was held to be the person behind a number of manifestly racist messages circulating within a particular newsgroup (soc.culture. belgium). The court found that analysis of these messages clearly indicated the deliberate intention by the person writing them to encourage segregation, hate or violence in respect of the Moroccan and African communities in Belgium,...

By an order delivered on 17 June 1999, the presiding judge at the Court of First Instance in Brussels, sitting in urgent matters, ordered TVI, the private television channel of the French-speaking Community to pay SABAM, the company which manages royalties, the provisional sum of Belgian franc (BEF) 100 million per annum for the years 1997, 1998 and 1999, less the amounts actually paid in respect of these three years. There has been a dispute since 1997 concerning the annual licence fees to be paid by TVI for authorisation to use all the works in the SABAM repertoire for television broadcasting...

On 15 May 1999 a new ministerial circular on relations between the media and the law came into force. The circular defines the procedure and the general principles for information which may be transmitted to the press by the courts and the police during the preparatory investigation stage. Under the current legal provisions contained in the act of 12 March 1998, which were designed to improve the criminal procedure at the information and investigation stage, communication to the press of information concerning preparatory investigations is the responsibility of the Crown Prosecutor after consultation...