CoE Parliament Supports New Audiovisual Media Services Convention
The Council of Europe moved closer Tuesday to updating its European Convention on Transfrontier Television for the Digital Age. Lawmakers supported recommendations by Andrew McIntosh from the U.K. and the Socialist Group to ask to council’s member governments to approve aligning the treaty as closely as possible with the EU’s audiovisual media services directive. Commercial broadcasters have one concern about the proposal but support it otherwise, said Ross Biggam, director general of the Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Europe.
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The revised treaty will affect commercial broadcasters in non-EU countries that are CoE members, Biggam said. They aren’t subject to the EU audiovisual media services directive but may choose to be governed by the rules of the convention, he said. The treaty is parallel to the directive, and it’s in everyone’s interest to make the documents as similar as possible, he said.
They can never be fully harmonized, the report said. The directive is a “Single Market instrument” with limited bearing on CoE concerns, while the reach of CoE regulations on fundamental rights and freedoms extends far beyond the jurisdiction of the European Commission, it said. The EC can punish governments that violate the directive, but the TV convention has only a standing committee with a limited supervisory role, it said.
Unlike the EU directive, which governs the cross-border flow of broadcast services in Europe’s internal market, the convention seeks to guarantee freedom of speech and information under the European Human Rights Convention, McIntosh said. Several years’ discussion of revising the treaty have produced a draft with valuable provisions, such as stronger protections for children and against racist and other hate speech and better provisions on media diversity, he said. But important questions remain, such as how to guard against censorship and what kind of legal structure is needed to enforce the new convention, he said.
All European media regulation must respect the right to freedom of expression and information as guaranteed in the human rights convention, the report said. The treaty allows member countries to require licensing of broadcasts, TV and cinema enterprises, but the assembly believes that “broadcasting and television in this sense should not include Internet radio or Web television, which should not require national authorizations,” it said. Instead, they should be treated the same as Internet-based newspapers or Web sites with text, images and sound, it said.
The only services subject to regulation now under the TV convention are those delivered over terrestrial spectrum, cable or satellite, McIntosh’s report said. On-demand services are specifically excluded, it said. But now that the EU has updated its TV Without Frontiers directive to the audiovisual media services directive, the CoE must extend the right to free retransmission of on-demand service between member countries, subject to basic principles guaranteeing fundamental rights and freedoms, it said .
But it rejected a proposal to allow countries to restrict transmission of on-demand services for public policy, health, public security or consumer protection. The EU directive imposes specific restrictions on those serves because they fit within “information society services” in the e-commerce directive, the report said. But there’s no equivalent CoE e-commerce regulation, and on-demand services should be treated the same as TV broadcast services, it said.
A crucial consideration is how to handle broadcasts “wholly or mostly” directed from one country to another CoE member to get around the receiving country’s law, and what procedural protections are needed before action can be taken against the originator, the report said.
The directive allows a government that believes its market has been wrongly circumvented by outside broadcasters to take its case to the EC, which has to enforce free movement of services across borders, Biggam said. But the TV convention’s standing committee doesn’t have the same power to adjudicate disputes, making broadcasters dependent on the goodwill of governments to resolve them, he said. That’s a “sticking point” for the broadcasters association, he said.
It’s reasonable for governments to want remedies against broadcasters that evade national law by broadcasting into their countries, the report said, but it’s unacceptable to ignore proper rules of procedures and natural justice. There’s no justification for countries take action on their own, and the new convention should include rules to prevent restriction of transmissions without prior agreement of the standing committee, it said.
The convention will be discussed at a May ministerial conference on the media and new communications in Reykjavik, Iceland.