Search results : 1094

At the end of last year, the Medienanstalt Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein (Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority – MA HSH), one of the 14 media regulators of the German Bundesländer, announced that it had instigated proceedings against social networking platform Twitter on account of breaches of provisions on the protection of minors in the media. According to the MA HSH, the US-based company, whose European headquarters are in Ireland, had already been asked to improve its youth protection procedures and the MA HSH had threatened further measures, possibly involving the Irish regulator,...

Just a few months before its 100^th anniversary, the Belgian Law prohibiting minors under the age of 16 from accessing the cinema will be abolished. This law, which was adopted on 1 September 1920, had been the subject of criticism for quite some time. A long revision procedure was hampered by questions related to the division of competences between the federal State and the communities. This issue was solved in 2014, through the sixth state reform, which transferred the competence for film classification to the communities (the Flemish, French-speaking and German-speaking Communities,...

On 27 August 2019, the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) decided that, before classifying a comment as ‘harmful to minors’ on the basis of the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag (Inter-State Agreement on the Protection of Minors in the Media), the author’s fundamental right to freedom of expression must be taken into account. The second chamber of the first senate of the Bundesverfassungsgericht therefore upheld a constitutional complaint lodged by a regional association of the extreme right-wing NPD party. The case concerned the association’s...

The Ministry of Digital Policy, Telecomunications and Information has issued a new classification system for TV programmes with its Decision No. 106/12.6.2019. This decision was the result of the National Council for Radio and Television's (NCRTV) relevant draft proposal, which was submitted to the Ministry, and a public consultation which ended on 30 April. The new system for the classification of TV programmes is based on their content as well as on the age of viewers. In particular, the classification of programmes depends on how likely they are to impair the moral, physical, psychological...

In a ruling of 30 October 2019, the German Bundesverwaltungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court) confirmed the rating of Bushido’s rap album ‘Sonny Black’ as harmful to minors. The Berlin rapper’s album glorified violence and contained highly discriminatory lyrics, according to the court. The decision examined the discretionary powers of the German Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Examination Office for Media Harmful to Minors – BPjM), the regulatory body responsible for classifying data media and telemedia with content harmful...