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The all-party National Heritage Committee, chaired by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, has recently called for laws to ban media payments to witnesses in criminal trials and to restrict pre-trial publicity. The committee, whose recommendations are made in a report, Press activity affecting court cases, also called for the Contempt of Court Act 1981 (Section 2) to be strengthened (para 36), so that individual newspapers could not escape punishment where pre-trial publicity collectively caused a trial to collapse. The report added that compensation should be ordered and fines imposed by the Press Complaints...

The Court of Appeal has upheld the reasonableness of the decision of the Radio Authority that Amnesty International UK is an "unacceptable advertiser" in terms of the advertising code of practice. The Code stipulates that "No advertisment may be broadcast by, or on behalf of, any body whose objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature." Amnesty International had sought to run a national radio advertising campaign, during 1994, deploring the situation in Rwanda. The Court interpreted the phrase "wholly or mainly" to mean at least 75%, and, in this case, the Master of the Rolls said that "...

The Regional Court of Paris delivered an interesting decision on 31 May 1996 on the use of Médiamétrie surveys in advertising. A radio station (NRJ) had published in a number of newspapers a series of advertisements including comparative tables of audience figures for three competitive stations; one of the advertisements included a picture of a ball rolling towards skittles bearing the marks of the other stations, to knock them down. The judge found the advertisements defamatory and outside the legal framework of comparative advertising, disallowed benefit of the provisions of Article L 121-8 of...

In IRIS 1996-5: 6 we reported on the publication of the European Commission's Green Paper on commercial communications in the Internal Market. On 27 November 1996, this Green Paper was discussed in the Economic and Social Committee, which adopted an Opinion on it, which was published on 3 March 1997. The Economic and Social Committee finds that the Green Paper makes constructive proposals to improve the functioning of the Internal Market. Furthermore, it welcomes the suggestion that the Member States should notify the Commission and other Member States of their legislative initiatives affecting...

The UK Government has now announced details of the formula for increases over the next five years in the licence fee which funds the BBC. The fee is payable annually by all users of television sets, irrespective of viewing habits, and permits the BBC to be free of the commercial pressures of advertising as no advertisements are carried on its services. The current figure for a colour television licence is £89.50 per year. In order to minimise governmental pressure which could occur if the funding were renegotiated each year, the new formula is linked to the annual inflation rate, determined by...