Back Supporting community media in Ukraine

Supporting community media in Ukraine

The “Freedom of the media in Ukraine” project, implemented within the Council of Europe and European Union Programmatic Cooperation Framework jointly with the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information Policy of Ukraine, held committee hearings on "Prospects for community media development in Ukraine” in Kyiv, on 15 September 2016.

Victoria Syumar, Head of the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information Policy, noted in her opening remarks that the issues of community media in Ukraine require legislative regulation.

Mårten Ehnberg, Head of the Council of Europe Office in Ukraine, said that Supporting the development of community media is an important tool to ensure media pluralism and enhance democratic development” and he stressed that according to the Council of Europe standards community media is recognised as a third pillar along with the commercial and public media, and it requires legislative regulation. Community media organisations are important part of the fabric of democratic societies. Development and maintenance of the community media is one of the ways to increase media literacy and critical thinking in the society.

Yuriy Artemenko, Chairman of the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine, Oleg Nalivaiko, Chairman of the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine, Tanel Tang, the Liaison Officer on Human Rights Defenders, Political Section, the European Union Delegation to Ukraine as well as about 20 representatives of regional broadcasters, also participated in the discussion.

The hearings aimed to present the existing draft laws on community media in Ukraine to the public as well as to discuss the recommendations provided by the Council of Europe expert.

Sergey Kostynskyy, Member of the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine, presented the draft law "On special aspects of local community broadcasting to promote and protect the information development of the state" developed by the National Council, the NGO "Ukrainian Association of Community Media” as well as MPs Gregory Schwerk and Vladislav Sevryukovym.  

The draft law assumes development a network of low-power FM-stations instead of communal wired radios. The low-power FM stations will be established by local communities and will broadcast their own content from 15 minutes up to 4 hours a day, and the rest of time they will re-broadcast the content of the "Ukrainian Radio” channel.

Natalia Stepanova, Head of the Internal Audit Department at the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine introduced a draft law "On community media developed on the principles of public service broadcasting", that was developed by the experts of the State Committee.

During the event Steve Buckley, the Council of Europe Expert (UK), has presented his analytical report “Community media in Ukraine: spectrum for development”. The report includes general overview of the media situation in Ukraine, as well as practical recommendations for the development of community media in the country.

According to the expert, to ensure the development of the community media it is important to amend the legislation to define the community media as a new, independent category.

Background information:

The Project “Freedom of media in Ukraine”, implemented within the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Union (EU) Programmatic Cooperation Framework (PCF) is aimed to improve freedom, independence, pluralism and diversity of media in Ukraine. The total budget of the Project is 177 thousand euro. The project is financed by the European Union and implemented by the Council of Europe.  The project implementation period is 1 January - 31 December 2016. More information on the Project can be found here.

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Kyiv 23 September 2016
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