Frank LaRue on Macri's AFSCA takeover: ‘This marks a return to the privileges enjoyed by monopolies’
Frank La Rue, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression from 2008 until 2014, warned that Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s move to nullify the landmark 2009 Media Anti-trust Law by decree was “an attack on freedom of expression” and “unconstitutional.”
“This represents a return to the privileges enjoyed by monopolies in Argentina, an era we hoped was over,” La Rue said in a conversation with the Herald.
His remarks came days after the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression of the Organization of American States (OAS), Edison Lanza, described the offensive against the AFSCA media monoply watchdog as an “unorthodox” move that bypassed the law and puts the agency “back to when governments had full control of the media office.”
“I share Lanza’s concerns,” said La Rue, a Guatemalan-born labor and human rights law expert. “We need to ask ourselves: what other setback will the new government bring to Argentina?”
La Rue hailed the new anti-monopoly regulations soon after the Media Law was passed in 2009 with broad majority in both houses of Congress and signed by President Cristina Kirchner, saying that “it seeks an equitable formula in the administration of broadcast frequencies” between public/state, commercial and community/non-commercial media outlets. “Argentina has turned into a worldwide example,” LaRue added at the time, “especially in relation to community media.”
Macri's decrees also reaped criticism from Professor Diego de Charras, Dean of the University of Buenos Aires School of Communications, who said that Macri's idea to transfer the regulation of cable television to a telecommunications department within the executive branch and of Macri's own creation (ENACOM) was “outrageous.”
Página/12 revealed yesterday that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) had sent the Macri administration a confidential letter demanding more details about the legality of the many measures adopted by decree since he took office on December 10. In the letter, the IACHR reminded Macri of the organization’s standards on freedom of expression, which includes working against media concentration to promote diversity and pluralism in the country.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/206040/%E2%80%98this-marks-a-return-to-the-privileges-enjoyed-by-monopolies%E2%80%99
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Macri's illegal decrees have been suspended for the time being by an administrative law court (http://www.democraticunderground.com/11741604). He can still fall back on the "judiciary party" though - right-wing judges and prosecutors (many of them Opus Dei) who use their offices to run interference for Macri's far-right entourage and harass opponents.