Search results : 115

In recent months, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers (CM) adopted five country-specific Recommendations concerning the application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Slovakia (first monitoring cycle); Slovenia and the United Kingdom (second monitoring cycle) and Hungary and Norway (third monitoring cycle). The Charter contains a number of provisions of relevance for the (audiovisual) media, the most detailed of which are to be found in Article 11. The latest Recommendations on the application of the Charter highlight a number of pertinent issues. In respect...

The Slovak Ministry of Culture has submitted a new draft of the Act on television licence fees for public service broadcasting provided by the Slovak Television and the Slovak Radio to the Government. It will negotiate the draft after the summer 2007. The new Act is expected to enter into force on 1 March 2008 and shall completely replace the current Act No. 212/1995 Coll. on television licence fees. The reasoning behind the new Act concerns the poor financial situation of the public service broadcasters Slovak Television and Slovak Radio and long term on-going problems with the payment of the...

The Slovak Ministry of Culture is expected to submit a new draft of the Media Act to the Parliament by the end of June. In cooperation with publishers, the Slovak Syndicate of Journalists has also participated in the drafting. The Minister of Culture of the Slovak Republic and the Chairman of the Slovakian Syndicate of Journalist have informed members of the Parliament concerning the urgency and necessity of the approval of such an Act. The purpose of the new Act is to regulate the exercise of the constitutional principle of freedom of speech and the right for information in the mass media, who...

The Slovak Parliament has recently approved an amendment to the Broadcasting and Retransmission Act No. 308/2000 Coll. The amendment to the act is published as No. 13/2007 and became effective on 1 February 2007. The amendment foresees that advertisement and tele-shopping spots must not be broadcast with a sound volume higher than the sound volume of the parts of the programme service that immediately precede or follow such spots. This parameter is also applicable to audio-visual tools separating advertisement and tele-shopping from other parts of the programme service. The purpose of this amendment...

In a judgment of 19 December 2006, the European Court of Human Rights considered the sanctioning of a radio station to be a violation of freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the Convention. The applicant, Radio Twist is a radio broadcasting company that was convicted for broadcasting the recording of a telephone conversation between the State Secretary at the Ministry of Justice and the Deputy Prime Minister in a news programme. The recording was accompanied by a commentary, clarifying that the recorded dialogue related to a politically influenced power struggle in June 1996 between...