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An Arabic news and current affairs broadcaster has been fined GBP 25,000 by the UK Telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, for promoting a political movement in Tunisia. The regulator found that Al Mustakillah Television Ltd had breached rules concerning impartiality and political reporting in two programmes broadcast around the time of the Tunisian general election in October 2011. Unusually, Ofcom went ahead with the sanction despite Al Mustakillah handing back its UK licences last year, because of the seriousness of the breach, and to “act as an effective deterrent to other licensees.” Three viewers...

The UK communications regulator, Ofcom, has fined two video-on-demand services, Demand Adult and Playboy TV (both owned by Playboy) for failing to verify effectively the age of users accessing pornographic websites. On-demand services, unlike other websites, are regulated under the Communications Act 2003 by means of a co-regulatory regime. The Association for Television on Demand (ATVOD) has been designated as the appropriate regulator of editorial content in such services, whilst Ofcom itself has retained the power to impose sanctions (see IRIS 2012-9/26). The ATVOD rules, which implement the...

On 12 December 2012, Advocate General Jääskinen delivered his opinion to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the appeals procedure between UEFA and FIFA and the European Commission and thereby upheld the previous decisions of the European General Court (cases T-385/07, T-55/08 and T-68/08). The General Court had dismissed the football authorities’ complaints about the British and Belgian lists of events of major importance that must be broadcast on free-to-air television. The member states concerned had prepared their lists in accordance with Article 3a of the Television Without...

On 29 November 2012 Lord Justice Leveson published his report relating to the eponymous inquiry on the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The remit of the inquiry was extensive, covering topics from the relationship between the police and newspapers to the closeness of media proprietors to politicians, but perhaps the key focus and most potentially controversial outcome related to plans for the future of press regulation. The press in the UK has been under a loose form of self-regulation since 1991 when the current body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), replaced the old Press Council...

Inquiries into the handling of two separate investigations into alleged child abuse by the BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight have found serious compliance and cultural problems. As a result of the second problem, the BBC’s Director-General was forced to resign. The first issue concerned the decision to drop an investigation into alleged child abuse by Jimmy Saville, a former disc jockey who had died on 29 October 2011. Newsnight commenced an investigation based on allegations by victims, including that the police had dropped their own investigation because of Saville’s age. However, the story...