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The Court of First Instance in Brussels has ordered Facebook to stop tracking users on third-party sites, and to destroy all similar data it has illegally collected thus far. The judgment is the latest in a long-running legal battle between the Belgian Privacy Commission and Facebook. The former started court proceedings against the social network site in 2015, when a study revealed that Facebook tracked non-users and logged out users for advertising purposes through “data cookies” on external websites (“third-party tracking”). Summary proceedings resulted in a judgment by the Brussels Court of...

In a case concerning religious extremism on the Internet, the European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) confirmed that defending “Sharia law” while calling for violence to establish it could be regarded as “hate speech”. The Court held that, in accordance with Article 17 (prohibition of abuse of rights) of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”), the discourse at issue did not fall under the protection of Article 10 of the ECHR, which guarantees the right to freedom of expression. The case concerns the conviction of Mr Belkacem, the leader...

The Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel de la Communauté Française (audiovisual regulatory body for the French Community of Belgium - CSA) wants to bring RTL Belgium under its control. However, the broadcaster, which belongs to the RTL Group and operates the RTL-TVi, Club RTL and Plug RT channels, only recognises the authority of the Autorité luxembourgeoise indépendante de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg independent audiovisual authority - ALIA). The CSA is the regulatory body for the French Community of Belgium. On 29 June 2017, it announced that it wanted to bring the broadcaster RTL Belgium under...

It is sometimes forgotten than Belgium’s complex institutional organisational structure in respect of audiovisual matters is not made up only of the country’s three linguistic communities (the French-, Flemish- and German-speaking sections of the population). A few areas of responsibility have been retained by the federal (that is to say, national) authorities; these include audiovisual matters in the bilingual region of Brussels-Capital - an area that is home to nearly 1.2 million people; Brussel’s French- and Flemish-speaking communities do have some responsibilities, but only with regard to...

In May and June 2016, the General Chamber of the Flemish Media Regulator issued six decisions that relate to the provisions in the Flemish Media Decree on sponsorship. In five cases the Chamber concluded that an infringement had occurred (for previous decisions, see IRIS 2015-6/6). Four of those five cases concerned a violation of Article 2 (41) of the Flemish Media Decree which contains the definition of sponsorship (“every contribution by a public or private company, the authorities, or a natural person not engaged in providing broadcasting services or producing audiovisual or audio works, to...