“We must not tolerate discrimination against Slovenian”

On Tuesday, 4 July 2023, MEP Irena Joveva responded to a request from POPTV’s 24UR programme for a comment on the new amendments to the Act on the public use of the Slovenian language and on the upcoming new European legislation, which could resolve at least part of the problem with discrimination against Slovenian in the digital environment. As she explained, the European Media Freedom Act, which she is helping to shape as one of the European Parliament’s negotiators, will to a certain extent also regulate streaming content providers on the European market. “We simply must not tolerate discrimination against the Slovenian language,” she said resolutely.

The MEP expects that Article 14 of the European Media Freedom Act will include a provision on coordination among regulators, which would simply force foreign companies (specifically streaming content providers such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime) to respect national laws and all official languages of the European Union, even if a company officially does not have an office or headquarters in a certain Member State, say Slovenia.

In her contribution, Joveva explained the idea using the example of a Slovenian inspection service establishing an irregularity or violation constituting discrimination against Slovenian as one of the official languages of the European Union. In such a case the said inspection service will be able to apply a certain mechanism and request inspection services of another Member State – e.g. in the Netherlands in the case of Netflix –, to see to the matter.

You can view the interview here.