„Moscow, 27 November, LETA. OSCE Representative on Press Freedom Miklos Haraszti has expressed his discontent with the situation of television in Russia, calling it an instrument of propaganda, according to the news agency AP. “One cannot speak about free election and democracy, if majority of population receive most of information from such television which is in the hands of the state authorities’ representatives or their family members,” said Haraszti. His criticism was directed also to the situation of television in Belarus, former Central Asia Soviet Republics and South Caucasus without specifying concrete countries. The Hungarian writer, journalist and human rights defender is the OSCE Representative on Press Freedom since 2004, and he has repeatedly criticized Russian federal authorities. In late 2007 he sent a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, containing a sharp condemnation of the pressure to the mass media before the parliamentary election. Russian Foreign Ministry then called the Haraszti’s claims as “attempts of separate Western forces to discredit the parliamentary election in Russia”.

Some time ago we already wrote about the Kremlin’s influence on Russian television channels. At the end of the last year, the OSCE representative Miklos Haraszti publicized his opinion on the situation in the Russian mass media, expressing his concern about the current situation in the sphere of press freedom, genuineness and objectivity of the published and broadcasted information. This concern is still supported by the Russian press freedom assessment made by the international organization “Reporters Without Borders”. In their press freedom index of 2009, “Reporters Without Borders” state that Russia is five more places down in the press freedom index, compared with 2008. In 2009, Russia dropped in the press freedom index to the 153th place, being accompanied by such countries as Rwanda, Libya, Tunisia and Brunei. With the decrease in the degree of judicial independence, press and political freedom, the democratic freedoms, defined in the human rights declarations with Russia’s participation, are increasingly limited in Russia. Presently Russia is obviously deviating from the course initiated in 1990s to the state’s overall democratization and observation of the basic human rights.