President of Latvia’s National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP), Ivars Āboliņš, has accused the representatives of TV Rain of asking to conduct the hearing on the channel case in the Russian language, local media outlet Delfi reports.
“We’re disappointed by TV Rain’s attitude — the channel representatives came to the NEPLP hearing without an interpreter and wanted to speak in Russian, so the hearing did not take place,” Āboliņš told Delfi.
TV Rain’s editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko told Novaya-Europe that the representatives of the channel “never proposed to hold official discussions in the non-official language of Latvia”.
“The council dedicated to revoking TV Rain’s broadcasting licence was held without the channel’s representatives present; we weren’t invited. Until that moment, we discussed various questions with the council many times, [during those discussions] Russian was used as the working language, by agreement of the parties, we had no need for an interpreter. During a meeting in October, there was an offer to switch to Latvian, and at the moment we didn’t have enough time to invite an interpreter,” Dzyadko says.
Earlier today, NEPLP revoked the broadcasting licence of TV Rain.
“Due to the national security and public order threat, this morning NEPLP made a decision to cancel TV Rain’s broadcasting permission,” Āboliņš tweeted.
“We continue our work and consider all accusations against us to be unjust and absurd,” TV Rain later said in a statement.
