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On 17 June 2010 President Serzh Sargsian of Armenia signed into law the statute “On Introducing Amendments and Supplements to the RA Law ‘On Television and Radio’”. The document was adopted by the National Assembly (parliament) in the final second reading on 10 June 2010. The draft law was elaborated on by the Ministry of Economy and was justified by the need to switch from analog to digital broadcasting. This is the latest set of amendments to the broadcasting statute of Armenia (see IRIS 2010-5: 1/6 and IRIS 2008-1: 7/6). The amendments introduce a new text into the whole broadcasting statute,...

On 28 April 2009 the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia (RA) passed a package of amendments and supplements to the national statutes “On Television and Radio”, “Statute of the RA National Commission on Television and Radio”, “Statute of the RA National Assembly”, and “On State Duty”. The aim of these bills as stated in the Justification was to ensure the “independence of the bodies that regulate public and private media (National Commission of Television and Radio and Public Television and Radio Council)”. Numerous amendments and additions to the existing statutes were introduced, some...

Since the beginning of 2009, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers (CM) has adopted five country-specific Recommendations concerning the application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Serbia (first monitoring cycle); Armenia, Austria and Cyprus (second monitoring cycle) and Sweden (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. Of the latest batch of Recommendations on the application of the Charter, the most specific references to the audiovisual...

In a judgment of 17 June 2008 the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the refusal by the Armenian authorities, on several occasions, to grant the Meltex television company requests for broadcasting licences amounted to a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court firstly recognized that the independent broadcasting company Meltex was to be considered as a “victim” of an interference with its freedom of expression by the Armenian public authorities: by not recognising the applicant company as the winner in the calls for tenders it competed...

On 15 November 2007, Miklós Haraszti, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, presented his regular report to the OSCE Permanent Council, the organization’s main decision-making body. This was his third and final report of the year. Mr. Haraszti’s presentation began with a commemoration of Alisher Saipov, “a young journalist whose promising career was cut short by an act of brutality”. Saipov, a correspondent with the internationally acclaimed media outlets Ferghana, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, and a founder of an Uzbek-language newspaper, was shot and killed in downtown Osh...