Brussels, 11/05/2006 (Agence Europe) - The European Newspaper Publishers Association (ENPA) is delighted that the Finnish Presidency appears to want to make information society in the second half of this year a priority. ENPA's General Assembly on 5 May, as well as the Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen used this occasion to provide a number of indications about Finland's programme for the information technology sector, which will be one of four priority action programmes of the future presidency. Intellectual property will be one of the subjects on the agenda and a high level conference in Helsinki on 13-14 July on “Content and Copyright Policy” has also been organised. Revision of the “Television without Frontiers” directive will be another important theme and Mr Vanhanen underlined that he supported deregulation of the television sector on the conditions that the principles planned for advertising clearly guarantee consumers a distinction between advertising and other contents. The Prime Ministers also raised the importance of the written press, in his speech, for public opinion and declared that, “a free press is fundamental to an open and transparent society”.
The Finnish Presidency's programme, which takes over from Austria on 1 July, is not, however, completely finalised, as Mr Vanhanen stressed last week during a meeting with the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso (EUROPE 9185).