IRIS Special report "Transparency of media ownership"
Summary
The last part of the report is a country-by-country analysis of the legislative approach to transparency of media ownership in nine European countries: Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Poland and the Russian Federation. The impossibility of a harmonised approach at EU-level so far Terms related to transparency are scarcely found in the Treaty of European Union (TEU), Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) and European Charter for Human Rights (ECHR), although it plays a key role in EU primary law. EU member states have opted for various approaches based on EU secondary law – several of which are studied in the report – though often based on non-media specific secondary law, since Article 5(2) of the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) is vague regarding the rules that member states should adopt with regard to transparency and only makes it a possibility rather than an obligation. The Council argues that the adoption and effective implementation of a media-ownership regulation can play a key role in greater transparency, solve issues of cross-media ownership and direct and indirect ownership, without however laying down provisions for supervision or sanctioning mechanisms. The report also notes the existence of several other initiatives dealing with the transparency of media ownership, with limited results given the impossibility to rely on harmonised international rules and enforceable national obligations.