BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA / The reform for financing BHRT rejected

On July 19^th the Bosnian Parliament rejected the draft reform on public broadcasting funding, which includes the public television service BHRT.

The idea behind the reform was to include each person’s TV license fee with their electricity bill, a method recently adopted in Italy. At present the fee is part of the bill for fixed telephones, but increasingly Bosnians are using only mobile phones. The annual fee is €3.80, but according to Al Jazeera Balkans it’s only paid by about 50% of Bosnian households.

Income from the license fee decreases by €2 million a year, according to BHRT’s managing director, Belmin Karamehmedovic.

The proposed reform would also have changed the way the state allocates that income – BHRT would have kept 40% of its revenue from advertising and license fees.

Following Parliament’s decision, Damir Smital, chairman of BHRT’s independent union, expressed his dissatisfaction, repeating that if the reform was not adopted very soon, public television would “not be able to support its expenditure much longer”.

With BHRT crippled by debt, the channel’s directors had planned to stop broadcasting at the end of June. But before the deadline they found a solution which allowed them to broadcast the Euro 2016 football and then continue transmitting. According to Balkan Insight, the situation remains very uncertain and to put pressure on the government, public television could again threaten to cease broadcasting.

Sources: Balkan Insight, Al Jazeera Balkans