HEADS OF U.S, BRITISH, GERMAN EMBASSIES MEET WITH NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR TV AND RADIO BROADCASTING.
EXCERPTS OF U.S. AMBASSADOR CARLOS PASCUAL’S REMARKS TO THE MEDIA

Obviously this is an extremely important and sensitive period in Ukraine. The practical actions that the government (and the National Broadcast Council) takes, will have a major impact on people's understanding of whether free press can actually operate in Ukraine. For that reason we focused our discussion on the licensing process, which is the responsibility of the National Broadcast Council. In particular we wanted to discuss how the licensing process works and whether there will be a sense at the end, that it was fair and that it allowed for broadcast stations to operate independently.

From our perspective, where there is a major gap, is in making available clearly to the public the criteria that will be used to assess the applications. As the members of the Council indicated, the principal criteria that have been issued so far, are those that are laid out in Ukrainian law. By the admission of many members of the Council those laws are complicated, and as one Council member said, they don't meet the current requirements of Ukraine. And even in our discussion here there were differences of views, even internally within the Council, on how some of the criteria that are in the law would be interpreted.

So this is going to present a real challenge to the Council on creating public confidence that it has acted in very fair and transparent way. The president of the Council has agreed that he will convene a meeting in the first half of February to try to explain these criteria more clearly to the bidders. We have made some suggestions that possibly consideration be given to even extending the period for the bids, or amending the bids, if in fact that's necessary. Obviously it's up to the Council to consider this.

Our objective here has consistently been to help get real objective information to the Ukrainian people. The reason this meeting was so important was that it gave us the opportunity to use concrete actions, namely the licensing process, to discuss what are the practical processes that are being put in place in Ukraine to insure that this objective information can get to the Ukrainian people.

I think that it was a constructive meeting because it helped to identify weaknesses that exist right now. The real test now is going to be how the National Council and others in Ukraine can address some of those weaknesses that we identified to actually improve the process and reinforce the freedom of the press and the ability of the press to operate independently.