Search results : 148

In May 2009, the Court confirmed once more the applicability of the right to freedom of expression and information guaranteed under Article 10 of the Convention to matters of access to official documents. The case concerns the attempt by a historian, Mr. János Kenedi, to have access to certain documents deposited at the Ministry of the Interior regarding the functioning of the State Security Services in Hungary in the 1960s. Mr Kenedi, who had previously published several books on the functioning of secret services in totalitarian regimes, complained to the European Court about the Hungarian...

Országos Rádió és Televízió Testület (National Radio and Television Commission - ORTT) has decided to launch the tender process for the right to broadcast on the two national analogue radio networks. Currently these networks are used by two commercial radio companies (the Danubius Rádió Műsorszolgáltató Zrt. and the Sláger Rádió Zrt.). Both companies won their licences to provide their respective national radio programme services in 1997 by concluding a broadcasting contract with the ORTT. The original term of these contracts was 7 years. Later this term was extended by 5 more years. The extended...

In April 2009, the European Court of Human Rights delivered an important judgment in which it recognised the right of access to official documents. The Court made it clear that, when public bodies hold information that is needed for public debate, the refusal to provide documents in this matter to those who are requesting access, is a violation of the right to freedom of expression and information guaranteed under Article 10 of the Convention. The case concerns a request by the Társaság a Szabadságjogokért (Hungarian Civil Liberties Union - TASZ) to Hungary’s Constitutional...

In April the Gazdasági Versenyhivatal (Hungarian Competition Authority - GVH) finalised and published its report examining competition on the Hungarian media markets. The basis of the report was a general sector inquiry launched by the authority on 24 July 2007. Its subject was TV broadcasting in Hungary as a whole. The GVH named three factors as reasons for initiating such a review: - the obvious disproportionality between the audience share of the two national commercial TV channels RTL-Klub and TV2 (together approx. 60 %) and their share on the TV advertising market (together approx. 90 %)...

On 24 February 2009, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) made public its latest reports on Bulgaria, Hungary and Norway, adopted in the fourth round of its monitoring of the laws, policies and practices to combat racism in the Member States of the Council of Europe (for commentary on earlier reports, see IRIS 2008-4: 6, IRIS 2006-6: 4 and IRIS 2005-7: 3). In respect of Bulgaria, ECRI encourages the State authorities to “make the media aware, without undermining their editorial independence, of the need to ensure that the information they provide does not help to breed...