Do not confuse freedom of expression with violating the law

The National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) has started to straighten up the Latvian television broadcasting space. From February 15, it is forbidden to retransmit and distribute the program Rossija RTR in the territory of Latvia for a year. The decision was made because four significant violations of the law were identified, related to incitement to hatred, incitement to violence and provocation of military conflict.

Yesterday, NEPLP Chairman Ivars Āboliņš posted on Twitter: “This morning, NEPLP decided to exclude 16 programs from the list of programs to be retransmitted in Latvia, including REN TV Baltic and NTV Mir Baltic. The decision was made because it was not possible to obtain information that someone is representing these programs in Latvia.”

It should be noted that the decision to remove 16 programs from the list of retransmittable ones is not linked to their content. The reasoning for this decision is fundamentally different from the RTR decision. This is due to the uncertainty about the legal entity - distributor. As soon as there is a company responsible for distributing the channel in question, everything will return as before, although these channels should also be checked on whether there are any breaches of the law.

As for RTR, the ban on broadcasting this channel in Latvia has not been adopted for the first time. A similar decision was made on January 31, 2019, for a period of three months. At that time, three months came and went, RTR did not change a single thing in its content policy, but NEPLP acted as if nothing had happened and continued to ignore violations of the law of this channel. We can only hope that this time it will be different and the NEPLP will be up to the task.

Any reference to "freedom of expression" and the quotation of the words attributed to Voltaire should be stopped immediately in this case. Each country has its own laws that determine what is allowed and what is forbidden. If in Latvia it is forbidden to distribute pornography, anti-Semitism and similar things in the media, then these bans must be observed by everyone. If the RTR regularly violates Section 26 Parts (3) and (4) of the Electronic Mass Media Law, which prohibits incitement to interethnic hatred and incitement to military conflict, then such programs should have long been on the list of prohibited programs. This is not about "freedom of expression" or even propaganda. These are purely violations of the law.

Someone may think that Latvia's laws are too strict and restrict freedom of expression. As a member of the European Union, the Council of Europe and the OECD, Latvia is in the group of democratic countries of the world, where the demands for freedom of speech are the highest. No one has ever challenged the compliance of Latvian media laws with the requirements of democracy and freedom of expression in any international institution. Consequently, there is no reason to question the legality of the NEPLP decision and to invoke Voltaire or the true author of his famous expression, Evelyn Hall.

From a legal point of view, everything seems to be clear, but fans of Russian TV channels often invoke purely everyday aspects to defend these channels. Mostly they are two. First of all, there are many people living in Latvia who speak only Latvian and Russian. Depriving them of access to Russian TV channels would significantly reduce their choice. Given the quality (budget) of many Russian TV programs, the level of supply will fall and ordinary viewers, who may not watch Solovyov's propaganda programs at all, will suffer.

Unfortunately, this is true, but nothing can be done there because the law is the law and it can't be applied selectively. The fact that, in addition to programs that blatantly violate Latvian law, the channel broadcasts high-quality, highly professional programs, can be no reason for the NEPLP to ignore these violations. In fact, so far the laws have been applied quite selectively, because, by the nature of the law, RTR (and not only this channel) should have been banned in the territory of Latvia since the spring of 2014, when the chauvinist hysteria of “Krym nash” (Russian for "Crimea is ours") broke out in the Russian information space. The fact that the RTR is being banned for a longer period only now, seven years after Crimea, is a disgrace to the NEPLP and a testament to its toothlessness to date. It is high time the NEPLP started a serious fight against these TV channels - offenders, because only then can the NEPLP become a highly respected institution in society.

The second argument, which is made to keep everything the same, is the usual - those who want to watch it, they will find an opportunity. After all, there is internet and satellites. There is a short and clear answer to this "argument" - let these people watch on the Internet or satellite, but the main thing is that Solovyov and Skabeyeva do not continue their illegal activities through TV channels legally retransmitted in Latvia.

Here, too, the difference between the impact of the Internet and TV channels on public awareness must not be ignored. The Internet is still perceived as something private, individual, while TV channels are considered official, public, with more authority. If a fake news distributor, say, Jānis Pļaviņš publishes his fairy tales on the Internet, then they are of little interest to a wider audience, but it is easy to imagine how loud the outrage would get if he was invited to participate in an LTV1 program. This different reaction to information on the Internet and TV channels is obvious, therefore one of the main tasks of the NEPLP is to harmonize the Latvian television broadcasting space with the Latvian legislative space. So it would not happen that calls to drop bombs on various European cities and to make openly contemptuous remarks against specific countries and people would be broadcast in Latvia completely legally. It should have been stopped a long time ago.