The annual OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, the largest human rights conference in Europe, brought together hundreds of government representatives, experts and human rights defenders to review progress made by OSCE participating states in implementing their commitments in the field of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. During this year’s gathering, Norwegian Helsinki Committee, IMS and Article 19 raised a new series of challenges facing the media in Ukraine at a side event to the conference.
Attempt to monopolize media
Media freedom in Ukraine is under threat with renewed legal and physical attacks on the media. Ownership of media outlets lacks transparency and activists fear a further decline in media freedom. Certain successes such as the passing of the Access to Public Information Act in January 2011 are tempered by the large number of failed media reforms and negative developments in other areas such as broadcasting. In particular, the upcoming digitisation process risks forcing independent broadcasters off the airwaves for good and risking monopolisation of the broadcast market by a small number of media. To make matters worse journalists in Ukraine also face physical threat, in recent year several journalists including Vasyl Klymentyev and Georgiy Gongadze, were declared as missing.
Lack of pluralism
The fall of totalitarian regimes and the privatization of media in Central and Eastern Europe in 1990s brought an end to state control of information. Media pluralism became a reality with the establishment of new private media. However, twenty years later, the state of media pluralism in Ukraine remains influenced by the political and economic conditions of the period of transformation to democratization and market economy.
ARTICLE 19 finds there are two main reasons for the lack of transparency: the companies which own media outlets are under no obligation to disclose the identity of their physical owners. Moreover, some media, especially broadcast media, are owned by companies registered in off-shore zones, mainly in Cyprus, and their ownership is shrouded by off-shore confidentiality laws. The issue lies with legislation in off-shore zones, which not only provides companies with tax benefits but also protects the confidentiality of their physical owners. As a result, Ukrainians do not know who the physical owners of the media companies are and cannot form an opinion on the information disseminated by the latter. Moreover, this lack of transparency raises questions about the affiliation of media groups with political and business groups, in Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.
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Speakers at the ARTICLE 19 and IMS event included Taras Shevchenko, Director of the Media Law Institute, Ukraine; Svitlana Zalishchuk, activist for the Stop Censorship and New Citizen Campaigns; Ekaterina Myasnikova of the Independent Association of Broadcasters and Chris Burnett, Senior Programme Officer for Europe at ARTICLE 19. The event was held as part of a joint IMS and ARTICLE 19 project supporting media development in Ukraine. The side-event was organised in the framework of the IMS Media and Democracy Programme for Central, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. More information with regard to free media in post-soviet space can be found here.
