Amnesty ready for legal action in battle to allow ads to be broadcast

Amnesty International is planning a renewed challenge to British laws that prohibit it from using TV and radio as advertising media, following the publication of a Green Paper from Brussels designed to harmonise marketing rules throughout the European Union.

The ban on political advertising on TV and radio in the UK – enshrined in the 1990 Broadcasting Act – has already resulted in one radio campaign by Amnesty being blocked.

An Amnesty source says: “The new Green Paper on commercial communications is good news because it should offer us another way of disputing a national law we consider to be unfair.”

Amnesty argues that it is mainly a humanitarian organisation but British law classifies it as mainly political.

The Radio Authority outlawed an advertising campaign about atrocities in Rwanda in May 1994, and an attempt to dispute the decision in the UK courts failed in June last year.

The Red Cross is also believed to have been prevented from running a TV campaign – about the dangers of landmines – which was supposed to be aired on London-based MTV later this year.

The Green Paper was published by the European Commission earlier this month, after more than three years of research.

It aims to improve cross-border marketing by standardising across the European Union the present muddle of national laws and self-regulation codes.

Excessive national restrictions will be put to the test by a committee chaired by the European Commission and comprising representatives from each EU country.

Britain’s ban on political advertising on TV and radio is singled out in the Green Paper as being disproportionately restrictive.