(AMARC/IFEX) – The following is a 14 July 2006 AMARC press release: Colombia, 14 July 2006 Constitutional Court rules in favour of establishment of Bogotá community radio stations After a 10 year wait, the demands of Bogotá-based social organizations for the right to establish community radio stations has been heard and accepted. A 13 July […]
(AMARC/IFEX) – The following is a 14 July 2006 AMARC press release:
Colombia, 14 July 2006
Constitutional Court rules in favour of establishment of Bogotá community radio stations
After a 10 year wait, the demands of Bogotá-based social organizations for the right to establish community radio stations has been heard and accepted. A 13 July 2006 Constitutional Court ruling on a constitutionally-based request for a legal remedy requires the Ministry of Communications to “explain why the call for community-based radio stations to be set up in Bogotá has not been announced, despite the fact that a regulatory framework for this service was established over 10 years ago.”
Responding to the citizen’s group Voces Ciudadanas, the Court also warned that the ministry has spent six years “defining the technical characteristics of the community radio stations that could function in Bogotá, but still has not issued information about the results of these studies.”
The case was presented by Bogotá-based community organizations in response to the unjustified delay in the issuing of calls for such stations to be established in the departmental capitals, despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly recognizes the right to establish communication media, and also despite the fact that the decree regulating community-based broadcasting does not exclude urban areas, including even large cities.
AMARC has been insisting to the Ministry of Communications that there was a contradiction between the legislation – considered one of the continent’s best – and its application, in which technical or procedural pretexts were used to limit the community’s full exercise of freedom of expression. This policy became, in effect, a form of indirect censorship, produced by, fundamentally, pressures brought to bear by the big radio and television business owners, who were willing to accept that community-based radio stations be established in isolated municipalities, but not in the centres where power is exercised.
Mauricio Beltrán, national coordinator of the International Service for Peace (Servicio Internacional para la Paz, SIPAZ) and also the representative of AMARC Colombia, hopes that “this ruling will open the doors to community radio in the 14 cities where nearly 70 percent of the population lives.”
