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On 30 June 2009 the Hungarian Constitutional Court declared a recent amendment to Act I of 1996 on Radio and Television Broadcasting (Broadcasting Act) incompatible with the Constitution. The amendment was adopted by the Parliament on 8 December 2008. The new rules would have made possible the renewal of broadcasting licences without tendering in the case of analogue programme services, given that the broadcaster concerned undertakes obligations to contribute to the process of the digital switchover. The term of such renewal was determined to be a maximum of five years, but it may not exceed the...

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 %)...