Article
Audiovisual Regulation in Russia in the Context of the Council of Europe Standards
This paper explores, mainly from a legal perspective, the extent to which the Russian regulations of traditional TV and online audiovisual media policies have been consistent with the Council of Europe (hereinafter CoE) standards. The study compares between the CoE and Russian approaches to specific aspects of audiovisual regulation including licensing, media ownership, public service media, digitalization, and national production. The paper first studies the CoE perspective through examining its conventional provisions related to audiovisual media, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as well as the CoE non-binding documents. The paper then considers Russian national legislation governing audiovisual media and the Russian general jurisdiction courts’ practice on broadcast licensing. The paper suggests that the Russian audiovisual regulations are insufficiently compatible with the CoE standards and more in line with the Soviet regulatory traditions.
Article contains analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights on freedom of expression, in which the Court had to balance public interest against the protection of commercial structures from unfair competition or injury to their business reputation.
The article analyses interpretation of the articles of the European Convention on Human rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which guarantee the right to private and family life, to marry, to access court and to be free from arbitrary detention in the context of formal equality and non-discrimination for the persons with mental disabilities. The author argues that the judges of international courts interpret human rights language not literally, but broadly, pragmatically – involving comparative legal studies, judicial practice of different states, fact analysis for the better protection of fundamental rights of the applicants, thus employing compensatory possibilities of law for the equalization of the possibilities to access the rights for the persons, belonging to disadvantages groups.
The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Yearbook is the only independent academic publication dedicated to the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, its work, and the issues that concern it. This Yearbook contains a wealth of writing from experts and practitioners relating to various aspects of freedom of the media.
The article is devoted to a particular form of freedom of assembly — the right to counter-demonstrate. The author underlines the value of this right as an element of democratic society, but also acknowledges the risk of violent actions among participants of opposing demonstrations. Due to this risk, the government may adopt adequate measures restricting the right to counter-demonstrate, certain types of which are analyzed in this paper.
This chapter examines how the concept of free speech has evolved in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. It also assesses the impact of international standards on the development of Russia’s concept of freedom of speech. Along with the main legal documents, including constitutions and media laws as well as the judicial practice of the highest courts, Marxism-Leninism will be examined to help clarify Russia’s view of free speech. The chapter argues that, in Russia, the change in political regime has encouraged a reconsideration of the concept of freedom of speech by political leaders. It shows the similarities between Lenin’s ideas and the modern Russian concept of free speech. Also indicated is the impact of international standards on free speech as superficial and dependent on political will.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.