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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...

This note reviews the Joint Declaration adopted on 3 February 2010 by the four special IGO mandates for protecting freedom of expression - the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, the OAS Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information. It was adopted with the assistance of ARTICLE 19 and the Centre for Law and Democracy (for former Joint Declarations see IRIS 2009-9: Extra, IRIS 2009-2: Extra, IRIS...

On 17 February 2010, Regeringsrätten (the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court) delivered a judgment in a case regarding the placement of commercial breaks in the film ‘Clear and Present Danger’, starring Harrison Ford, broadcast by the Swedish nationwide television channel TV4. Granskningsnämnden för radio och TV (the Swedish Broadcasting Commission - GRN) initiated proceedings against TV4 claiming, inter alia, that it had violated section 7:7 of Radio- och TV-lagen (the Radio and Television Act - RTL), since TV4 had placed a commercial break in connection to a scene where the drama of the film...

On 1 March 2010, the Italian Council of Ministers passed an amended draft legislative decree for the implementation of Directive 2007/65/EC on Audiovisual Media Services (AVMSD), to address the recommendations by the relevant Parliamentary Committees on the Government’s earlier version of the bill, presented on 17 December 2009 (see IRIS 2010-2: 1/25). In the context of the consultations on the original bill, several stakeholders had voiced concerns about the purported extension of the rules on audiovisual media services to private blogs and websites publishing user-generated audiovisual content,...

The Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας (Council of State), the highest administrative court of Greece, made a request for a preliminary ruling to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in its decision 4229 of 29 December 2009 in relation to whether Article 1 para. (d) of Directive 89/552/EEC of the Council (known as the Television without Frontiers Directive), as it currently stands, requires that the provision of payment or similar consideration is a necessary conceptual element of the notion of intention to present advertising in the context of surreptitious advertising. The question was posed on the occasion...