The Law “On Media” angered Irina Gerashchenko
People's Deputy of Ukraine, co-chair of the European Solidarity parliamentary faction Iryna Gerashchenko, commenting on the conclusions of the European Commission to the bill on media, said that the bill in its current version “will throw Ukraine back to the times of censorship and temniks.” The parliamentarian announced this on the social network Facebook, they write UN.
“Unfortunately, instead of an important media code, we can get a law on censorship, with unlimited rights of the National Council, completely dependent on Bankova. The hypocrisy is that the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada is pulling this bill as one of the 7 obligations of Ukraine as an EU candidate country. But in fact, the draft law received critical conclusions from both the European Commission and the Council of Europe,” Gerashchenko wrote.
“At the conciliation councils, I repeatedly called on the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada to make these conclusions public so that colleagues would realize that the project does not meet EU requirements. On the contrary, our partners point out that it is inadmissible, undemocratic and non-European to give the National Council unusual powers, to allow channels to be closed without trial, while not ensuring its minimum independence,” the people’s deputy noted.
According to Gerashchenko, even during the first reading of this law, European Solidarity warned colleagues that these norms would aggravate the situation with freedom of speech. And she called to improve them. The bill also contains a lot of controversial norms on elections and audiovisual production, which will also worsen the access of race participants to the media and legitimize uneven and non-transparent coverage of the electoral process.
“But the cleansing of the media field is very technical, the authorities have driven everyone into a marathon , and those who resisted were thrown out of digital broadcasting. And now we have every chance to get, instead of diversity and pluralism in the media, a continuous Rada channel with nauseating propaganda content,” Gerashchenko noted.
“I am sincerely surprised by the silence of the journalists themselves. I will publish the conclusions of the European Commission to the bill adopted in the first reading. Unfortunately, by the second reading, the odious norms on the all-powerful National Council have not changed. It's a shame that under the flag of European integration, Ukraine is thrown back during the times of censorship and temniks,” the People's Deputy emphasized.
Eurosolidarity is perhaps the only faction that did not vote this bill in the first reading and is now publicly trying to stop its most odious norms. The Freedom of Speech Committee, headed by Shufrich, withdrew itself from the discussion on the media bill altogether. This is some kind of sheer madness,” Gerashchenko summed up.
Recall that the people's deputies criticized the new law “On Media” approved in the first reading due to the reduction of quotas for the Ukrainian product, as well as the abolition of the so-called “black lists » performers.
Earlier, NUJU Secretary Serhiy Lyamets, citing sources in the President’s Office, said that the draft law “On Media” would be voted on in the second reading this week.
As reported by Ukrainian Novini, member of the board of the Internet Association of Ukraine Maxim Tulyev, is sure that the adoption of the bill on media will lead to the blocking of websites at the request of officials.
The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine said that the law on media could “cast a shadow of a dictator on Zelensky »
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