Asturias community radio action

Saturday January 28, 2012 01:34

by Costas A. - WSM-personal capacity

In Spain there are a very bad situation with the Free Radios in Asturias. Send this Comunicado to the Jefatura Provincial de Telecomunicaciones de Asturias and help them!

This is the address

Jefatura Provincial de Telecomunicaciones.
C/ Campomanes, 14
33008 OVIEDO
Teléfono: 985 21 12 90 Fax: 985 20 92 53

From the organization_____________________________________________________ we want to show ours more energetic protest by the action of the Jefatura Provincial de Telecomunicaciones of Asturias about the community radios.

This department (under the authority of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce) has started to send letters to the residents of the flats where there is located the necessary equipment to broadcast of some community radios of the region.

In those letters, the authorities required the neighbours to tell them who is the owner of the equipment and they are threatened with possible fines of up to 500.000 euros. We consider that the aim of this action is to put pressure on the neighbours and to scare them because of giving their consent to the installation of the free radios equipment.

This situation is in keeping with declarations of the Jefatura Provincial to some of the affected free radios, in which it plans to close these social media that have been many years broadcasting without the possibility to obtain a license.

We understand that those letters to the neighbours are harassment and criminalizations actions towars free and communitary Asturian radios by an illegal situation that is responsibility of the autonomous and state governments. Asturias has an important tradition of social media from the beginning of 80’s. Despite of the essential work developed by these citizen communication projects in the fields of promotion of the Asturian culture, the citizen participation, the pluralism and the exercise of the freedom of expression; the different governments have evaded the legal recognition of these broadcasters, condemning them to an uncertainty and defenselessness situation.

Instead of threatening the free and community radios, it is necessary that the government puts into practice the article 4.1 of the Law 7/2010, of 31th March, General of the Audiovisual Communication, that indicates: “All the people have the right to receive the audiovisual communication throught plural media, as much public, as comercial, as communitary, that reflects ideological, political and cultural pluralism of the society”.

By all these WE DECLARED:

-Our support and solidarity with free and communitary Asturian radios.
-We demand the immediate cessation of pressure and harassment towards free and communitary Asturian radios.
-The recognition of the work developed by these broadcasters and the planning of licences as an obligation performance of the article 32.2 of Law 7/2010