EU public broadcasters demand treaty recognition

Date: 27/03/1997

By Leyla Linton

THE Dutch presidency will call for a stronger commitment from member states to public service broadcasting when EU culture ministers meet informally next month.

It wants changes to the Maastricht Treaty in order to protect European public broadcasters, many of whom are financed by a mixture of licence fees and advertising revenue, and will raise the issue at the ministerial meeting on 7 April.

European broadcasters feel vulnerable because they have no specific exemption from EU competition rules, although there is a recognition by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers of the cultural value of public service broadcasting.

“As long as we do not get anything in a revised treaty, we will not be safe,” said a spokesman for the European Broadcasting Union. “Guidelines were in preparation in the Directorate-General for competition (DGIV) three years ago and they have not been finished or applied. As long as we are being regarded as an exception to the rules, we will not be satisfied.”

Calling on Competition Commissioner Karel van Miert to publish a document clarifying how EU law would apply to radio and television, Matteo Maggiore of the BBC said the role of public broadcasters should be formally recognised.

A spokesman for Van Miert said decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. A series of competition complaints from private broadcasters about their rivals in the public sector are under investigation by the Commission, with decisions still awaited on long-standing grievances about state subsidies for public channels in France, Spain and Italy.

The Commission, so far, has only resolved one case, ruling last year that Radiotelevisão Portuguesa's 35-million-ecu worth of public financing between 1992 and 1995 did not constitute state aid. A relatively speedy resolution of this case was possible because of an accounting method which allowed the Commission to trace exactly where the public funding had gone.

British MEP Carole Tongue, the Socialist Group's spokeswoman on culture, has called on European ministers to recognise formally the importance of public service broadcasting.

“The EU has a chance here to be about more than economics. If politicians had a strong sense of what was at stake, then they could find it within their grasp to do this,” she said.