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The bill - examined at length and copiously amended at its first reading in the National Assembly and the Senate - passed through the joint mixed committee at the end of January. As a result of this examination, provided for in the urgent procedure adopted by the Government for passing the Act, the bill was ratified in the form it was submitted to the global vote of each assembly in the course of the following days. The package was finally adopted on 4 February 2009. Two types of appeal have already been lodged against the texts adopted. Firstly, opposition members of the Senate have called on...

In December 2008, the Vlaamse Regulator voor de Media (Flemish Regulator for the Media - monitoring and enforcement of media regulation) issued several interesting decisions. Two of them will be addressed below. Firstly, the Algemene Kamer (General Chamber) condemned the commercial broadcasting corporation SBS Belgium for a triple breach of the so-called “20 minutes rule” during the broadcasting of the programme “Lost”. This rule, described in Article 101 § 5 of the Omroepdecreet (Flemish Decree on Radio-broadcasting and Television), requires a period of at least twenty minutes to intervene between...

In a decision issued at the end of 2008, the Bundeskommunikationssenat (Federal Communication Senate - BKS) stated that Österreichische Rundfunk (the Austrian public broadcasting corporation - ORF) had violated the rules on the labelling of TV advertising and the separation of programme and advertising content. The BKS ruling concerned ORF programmes broadcast on its ORF 2 channel and was based on the following findings. On 28 July 2008, ORF broadcast a programme announcement with the ORF 2 corporate design followed by an "advertising divider", also with the ORF 2 corporate design but without...

It is now 20 years since the first publication of the European Convention on Trans-frontier Television (ECTT), which reflected the state of broadcasting at that time, and set out standards for regulation, and for promoting freedom of expression, by Council of Europe Member States. Since that time technological change in audiovisual media has been accelerating: with the switchover to digital transmission, the growth of video on demand, and most recently with the prospect of convergence with computing and telecommunications. Regulation which was possible when a few broadcasters transmitted to a...

On 11 December 2008, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a judgment regarding a ban on political advertising on television. The crucial question the Court had to decide was whether a blanket ban on political advertisements on TV, as it was applied in Norway, was to be considered “necessary in a democratic society'” within the meaning of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In principle, there is little scope under Article 10 of the Convention for restrictions on political speech or on debate on questions of public interest. However, a ban on paid political...