Latvia is finishing off Russian TV – the Russian Foreign Ministry threatens to “pay attention again” to the EU
Latvian deputies, while continuing a de facto war of extermination against the Russian language in the media, have long been making no secret of either their goals or their openly politicized approach.
Official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova stated this during a briefing, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“On June 11, the Latvian Seimas in its final reading approved amendments to the law “On Electronic Media” introducing language quotas on television. From July 1, 2021, 80 percent of television programs will have to be published in EU and European Economic Area languages. No more than 20 percent is allocated to other languages, including Russian. This figure in no way corresponds to the statistics of the popularity of Russian TV channels, which are preferred by a significant part of the country’s residents,” Zakharova said.
She added that the initiators of the changes from among the conservatives in the Seimas have never hidden that the main goal is to artificially reduce the share of Russians on Latvian broadcasting.
“The reformers call their campaign against the Russian language a “fight against Russian propaganda” and they were absolutely not embarrassed by the wide negative resonance of this initiative in Latvian society. The Russian-speaking community and the professional television community sharply condemned and opposed the changes that significantly limit the legal access of the country's citizens to sources of information in a language they understand.
In addition to language restrictions, the amendments impose a ban on the retransmission of TV channels that have been sanctioned by the National Electronic Media Council in the last three years as part of the basic, most accessible and, accordingly, the most popular television broadcasting package.
This will, first of all, hit the Rossiya RTR TV channel, which has already been subject to temporary blocking in Latvia due to its editorial policy. In general, this story does not leave the opportunity to characterize this situation otherwise as a politicized approach of Latvian deputies,” said the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
At the same time, she noted that even if formally the technical possibility of accessing Russian TV channels in Latvia still remains, then only on the condition that they will be part of additional more expensive television broadcast packages.
“We again draw the attention of European partners to the inconsistency of this practice with democratic standards and Riga’s international obligations in the field of ensuring free access to information and its free dissemination. We call on relevant international organizations and human rights structures to respond. For our part, we will certainly give them all the materials,” Maria Zakharova promised.
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