THE NATIONAL UNION OF
JOURNALISTS OF UKRAINE
Two of the three proposals submitted by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) for public discussion with representatives of the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine have been taken into account and, in the future, will have to be included in draft by-laws for the implementation of the Law On Media.
As for the third proposal, after discussing it and expressing a position on the necessity to make relevant changes, the representatives of the National Council took note of the remarks and informed that this topic would be brought up for discussion at the next meeting. This was said by a representative of the NUJU/lawyer Danil Serbin (IBC Legal Services), who participated in the discussion of draft documents organized by the National Council on Tuesday, May 16.
In particular, the requirement to submit the official (registered) name of an online media company was removed from the draft procedure for online media registration. The Union received appeals from media workers who considered such a demand unlawful. Now it will be enough to indicate only the name of the online media under which the entity carries out or wishes to carry out its activities.
In addition, the draft document highlights the requirements for determining the specific territory of online service provision. Such a requirement was found to be inappropriate, as the actual mentioning of one or several territories does not make sense in view of the online services specifics accessible for people from any part of the world.
The third proposal of the NUJU concerned the requirement to specify the language of print media during registration. According to the Union’s conclusion, since the law does not contain such requirements, it should be removed from the regulatory-legal act.
“During the meeting, I expressed our position regarding the impracticality of defining one specific language during registration. Oleksandr Burmahin, a member of the National Council, assured that such information is mentioned to keep statistics and that the regulator does not impose any sanctions in case some copies are issued in other languages if this does not go against the law. I insisted that such a position be expressed via the introduction of appropriate amendments to the law or the registration application. Then the entity in the field of print media will not need to make changes to the register if the newsroom prints several issues in another language or languages within the framework of the law,” Danil Serbin commented.
According to the discussion results, the regulator’s representatives changed the wording in the draft regulatory-legal act to the “language (languages)” of print media. They promised to work on the issue at the next meeting.
Regulatory-legal acts for implementing the Law On Media must be adopted no later than June 30, 2023.
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