MOSCOW (RIA Novosti analyst Vasily Kononenko).
The State Duma is planning to adopt the federal law On Endowing the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation with Additional Powers to Ensure Civil Control over the Observance by the Media of the Principles of the Freedom of the Press.
However, even though debate has just begun, the authors of the bill seem unable to make practical decisions because they are afraid of total control by any commission that will monitor the implementation of such laws and also because it is not yet clear how the Public Chamber will be formed.
"This bill, drafted in the Kremlin on the president's instructions, looks very democratic at first glance," Russian Journalists Union Secretary Mikhail Fedotov said. "However, the point at issue is the need to monitor the way the press observes the principles of its freedom, not to guarantee the freedom of the press. In reality, a body of censorship is being created."
Mikhail Delyagin, a well-known political scientist and scientific supervisor at the Institute of Globalization Problems, expressed similar concerns. "The Public Chamber deciding whether public opinion represented in the media is balanced or not reeks of censorship. Formally, it will be public censorship, not state censorship, which is even worse," Delyagin said.
Journalists and experts are scared by the president's term "additional powers." The problem is that when someone is endowed with powers in Russia, those under this authority or dependent on it, often individual citizens, suffer.
However, the authors of the bill, members of the State Duma Committee on Public Associations and Religious Organizations, are convinced that such fears are unfounded. In a meeting with RIA Novosti, they said first and foremost that highly respectable and competent people, known for their impartiality, would work on the law.
Secondly, the Public Chamber was designed to monitor the observance of citizens' basic rights and freedoms by authorities, the bill's authors said. In other words, the authorities and the chamber will not sit in "one boat."
The Public Chamber, designed to be an instrument for civil society to balance executive authority, has yet to be created. However, as we have seen, passions over its future role already run high.
"First of all, it is unclear why the Public Chamber is being formed on instructions from executive authority," Boris Reznik, vice chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, said. "Another mechanism of selecting candidates to this important institution of civil society could have been found to rule out the possibility of manipulation."
