Riga, 9 March 2015

The Country of Origin Principle for Audiovisual Media

ACT Member Companies

Paldies!

• Of course not absolute in European broadcasting – art 10 ECHR (“licensing of TV, duties and responsibilities, formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties etc”)

• AVMS restrictions on hate speech.

• Can a state restrict speech it finds distasteful?; • If so, how?

Freedom of expression

• Your programme states “the country of origin principle represents the core of the AVMS”.

• But then raises “the issue of non-EU channels registered in one EU jurisdiction yet targeting the audiences of other Member States with content that is deemed unacceptable by the receiving state”.

• ACT view on COO (In passing, it’s also the core of the CoE Convention)…

• Is Latvia/are the Baltic States an exception?

AVMS and Country of origin

• “An argument [could] be made for country of destination in certain, very specific cases”

• Comment: here we would see serious difficulties in definition, safeguards, and

interpretation for services which are indeed ‘registered in an EU jurisdiction’.

• Editorial responsibility and platform operators?

• Is there a noticeable practice of jurisdiction shopping either for tax purposes, advertising rules or other criteria?

Can AVMS help?

What else can be done?

a) Addressing the market failure in objective, ethical journalism to Russian-speakers in the Baltic states

b) A more profound – but collective – rethink of what is meant by ‘hate speech’?

We share the objective of the Latvian Presidency – that all citizens should have a wide range of news sources to choose from – but not the suggestion that AVMS is the right vehicle to achieve this;

Thank you, any questions ?

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Ross Biggam | Director General