Ecuador's new communications law: Media democratization or gag law?
| Autor | Saavedra, Luis Angel |
Ecuador's new communications law, passed on June 14, purports to democratize the media, redistribute frequencies, and expand access to the radio spectrum (NotiSur, Sept. 10, 2010). However, the creation of control agencies and new legal instruments that could undermine freedom of speech has called into question the government's affirmations that the law promotes communications rights in the country.
Although a transitional provision of the Constitution, approved Oct. 14, 2008, set a period of one year for creating a communications law, and the May 7, 2011, referendum ratified the president's proposal to create the law, including an entity (Consejo de Comunicacion) to regulate content (NotiSur, Feb. 4, 2011), lawmakers were unable to reach a consensus and suspended debate in April 2012 when it was clear that they lacked the votes to pass a law in line with the government's proposal.
The new Asamblea Nacional, dominated by the executive, approved the law in record time. The vote lasted only 35 minutes; no debate was allowed nor were the law's 109 articles and 22 transitional provisions read. Although the final version of the law was not unveiled until the night before the vote and only the titles of the six general sections were read, four sections (Preliminary Provisions and Definitions, Principles and Rights, Media Systems, and Content Regulation) were approved by 108 of the 135 deputies present and the other two (Communications Media and the Radio Spectrum) were approved by 110 deputies.
A law that could affect freedom of speech
The creation of two supervisory bodies to control content disseminated by the media--the Consejo de Regulacion y Desarrollo de la Informacion y Comunicacion and the Superintendencia de la Informacion y Comunicacion--as well as the imposition of a watchdog (Defensor de Audiencias) in press rooms, has elicited harsh criticism of the law, both nationally, where its constitutionality has been challenged, and internationally, including from the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Professor Farith Simons of the Universidad San Francisco in Quito says that, while rights like the rights to communication must be regulated, "the discretion of the control agencies is worrisome in that they are made up of only government representatives."
The Consejo de Comunicacion was supposed to include the participation of Ecuadoran civil society organizations and...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu pruebaCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
