Senate rejects lex TVN
02:49
On Thursday, the Senate (the higher chamber of Polish Parliament) dealt with the amendment to the media law, submitted by PiS deputies on July 7. The opposition appeared along with the TVN logo, the one in which the letter V is two fingers symbolizing victoria.
This change is aimed directly at TVN. It is to force the American media concern Discovery to sell this station because PiS wants to prohibit countries outside the European Economic Area from owning over 49 percent of shares.
MP Marek Suski (PiS), co-author of the short story, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and the head of the National Broadcasting Council, Witold Kołodziejski, while defending this project, publicly argued at the beginning that the change was necessary to eliminate a threat to national security if foreign powers, such as Russia or China, they wanted to buy assets in Poland. They do not raise this argument anymore.
Senator Barbara Zdrojewska (KO), the rapporteur for this bill in the Senate, presented the senators with the results of the expert opinions commissioned by the Senate. They are overwhelming for the law "lex TVN". All Senate experts judged that this amendment in many respects contradicted the constitution, the treaty on the functioning of the European Union, and the Polish-American trade agreement of 1990, and above all, it meant an attack on freedom of speech in Poland.
PiS passed the bill on August 11, after the scandalous decision by the Sejm Marshal Elżbieta Witek (PiS) to reassume the vote to postpone the Sejm session until September 2. It was only after the second vote that PiS passed the law against TVN. Senate lawyers argue that because the reassumption did not comply with the rules of the Sejm (a mistake in voting, as reported by Paweł Kukiz, is not a reason to repeat the vote), voting on "lex TVN" does not count.
