EU: Media freedom, essential

This message came from the meeting of the Commissioner for Enlargement, Stefan Fule, and the vice President of the European Council, Neelie Kroes – the Commissioner responsible for the digital agenda and the media policies in the EU – and with the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek.

“There is no democracy without free media. The freedom of speech and media pluralism is the heart of EU values. This must be the same for candidate and potentially candidate countries. I made this issue clear during my visit in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and I will repeat this next week in Turkey. The Commission might calculate the support of all respective committees and delegations of the European Parliament for rising the standards and awareness on this issue, not only within the EU but also at the neighbors”, Buzek declared.

The European Commission established this year, for the first time, a High Level Committee led by the former Latvian President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, and an academic center based in Firenze, with the purpose to reflect on a better promotion of media freedom and pluralism.

“The commission is working systematically for protecting the media freedom and pluralism. We have taken this very seriously, not only with the EU border, but in all our partner countries. Today’s meeting is another sign of the strong partnership between the Commission and the European Parliament for protecting the media freedom and pluralism. In 2011, the Commission used the existing competences for protecting the media freedom in Hungary. In a much different scale, the EU has supported the war for similar freedoms in Northern Africa and beyond. We support this in laws, through debate and researches. We support it officially and non-officially, and we will not withdraw from this support”, declared Neelie Kroes.

The joint press release says that this meeting with President Buzek is a continuance of the “Speak Openly” conference, held in May 2010 in Brussels with journalists from Balkan and Turkey.

The Commission evaluates that this conference has sent an important political signal to the governments of these countries after conveying the message that the freedom of speech issues have a big significance for the enlargement context.

 Meanwhile, the media community was asked to play a more active role for creating the conditions of a free media in their countries, in absence of the implementation of the EU regulation.

“The European Commission considers that freedom of speech is one of the main pillars of democracy, and is determined that the high standards for protecting the media freedom must be implemented by all states”, declared Commissioner Stefan Fule.

Commissioner Fule reported during a meeting the new measures of the EU for promoting the freedom of speech in enlargement countries.

One of these steps is the new approach to the admission negotiations with the candidate countries, where the media freedom functioning on terrain will be measured by the Commission during the entire dialogue process, in the framework of Chapter 23, which is related with the basic values of the EU in justice, freedom and security.

“Media freedom is one of the five main challenges in the annual document of the Strategy for Enlargement, and the situation for each country is deeply reflected in the progress reports”, says the joint press release.

Top Channel