European justice rejected on Wednesday the request of the news channel RT France (ex-Russia Today) to cancel the suspension of its broadcasting decided within the framework of EU sanctions against Moscow, which immediately promised to retaliate against Western media.
In its decision, against which the Russian state media has announced that it is appealing, the EU court argues in particular that this “temporary ban” does not “call into question” the freedom of expression “as such” unlike so claimed the Russian state media, sanctioned after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We are going to take similar pressure measures targeting the Western media working in our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “We are not going to let them work in our country either,” he added.
Accused of being instruments of “disinformation” by the Kremlin, the media Sputnik and RT (including its French-language version RT France) were banned from broadcasting in the EU from March 2, on television and on the internet, following to an agreement between the Twenty-Seven shortly after the start of the war.
The French situation is particular because, since the suspension of RT in Germany at the end of 2021, France was the only EU Member State to host an RT subsidiary on its soil.
In its judgment on Wednesday, the court found that “RT France’s restrictions on freedom of expression (…) are proportionate, in that they are appropriate and necessary, to the aims sought”, namely to prevent the “propaganda” in support of “the military aggression of Ukraine by the Russian Federation” during “broadcasts broadcast on television and on the Internet by a media fully financed by the Russian state”.
These measures, “as long as they are temporary and reversible, do not disproportionately affect the essential content of RT France’s freedom of enterprise”.
