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defaming people happens basically in
the heat of political fight – libel and
defamation laws should not be used for
sentencing because it can have, as the
Americans like to say, a chilling effect
on freedom of opinion.
In February, and this is something
that the Association for International
Broadcasting reported and lobbied
about because some of the
broadcasters affected are AIB
members, the Ukrainian authorities
closed Radio Kontinent. This local
station had for several years carried
programmes from the BBC, Deutsche
Welle, Radio Polonia and the Voice of
America but when Radio Kontinent
added programmes from Radio
Liberty, the Ukrainian authorities
acted rapidly to close the station. In
a case like that, what can the
Representative do?
Where it is a matter of endangering
pluralism of information in a given
country, like in the case you mentioned,
or a matter of physical endangerment of
journalists in person, then of course the
Representative is entitled to do what any
ombudsman would be entitled to do:
officially ask questions of government
representatives, start fact finding
missions and use different levels of
intervention to shed public light on the
issue – starting with private letters to
the Foreign Minister or other officials
asking for information, ending with
going to the country, holding press
conferences and protesting publicly
inside the country about the issue. There
is a long list of different levels of
intervention, including the quite
influential intervention at the so-called
Permanent Council of OSCE which is
basically the 55 ambassadors here in
Vienna convening every Thursday.
The Ukrainian case you mentioned of
course came up, and soon after I went
to Ukraine for an official fact finding
mission – the results will be made public
quite soon, I will present them to the
Permanent Council here. We looked into
that case as well, it was not a direct
government intervention that seized the
equipment, it was partly a commercial
dispute. One of our findings was that
even if it was an unfortunate coincidence
of otherwise government independent
decisions, in any country when those
seasoned, guaranteed government
independent editorial boards and
channels go off the air, the government
does very well if it pro-actively tries to
resolve the problem, otherwise the
unfortunate impression could be
produced that this is somehow a
government action to reduce pluralism
in the country – in a country where not
only politics is in a new democratic
learning phase but where also journalism
is still in a learning phase. So the
broadcasts of seasoned reporters, who
have experience in coverage of multi-
party politics, going off air is not a good
service to the quality of journalism in
the country.
Looking at recent OSCE press releases,
you have in the last month reported
on Kosovo, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan,
so the emphasis seems to be very
much on Eastern Europe.
I wouldn’t say so, no.
What about media freedom in Western
Europe – is all well in the West?
That is obviously not the case. We don’t
have a geographical focus, we really are
an institution for 55 countries. We
welcome them all to the club of the
democracies of the northern
hemisphere, but we don’t consider any
of them to be perfect. I did write a
letter to Mr. Sarkozy, the French
minister in charge of the Internet law
in France which has been critised by
many experts and NGOs as being too
statist in its solutions. I did write a
letter to the relevant minister in
Brussels when the Belgian police
detained the reporter of ‘Stern’
