RT (Russia Today) logoWASHINGTON, Mar 16Canadian authorities have decided to ban the broadcasting of RT and RT France TV channels in the country amid events in Ukraine, the Canadian Broadcasting Commission said in a statement released Wednesday. France is not in the public interest,» the Canadian regulator said in a statement.The MEP raised the issue of the legal grounds for blocking RT and Sputnik. It says that by its decision, the commission «excludes RT and RT France from the list of non-Canadian programming services and stations allowed for distribution.» «Canadian broadcasters no longer have the right to distribute products (of these channels) in Canada,» the statement says. Earlier, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the blocking of the work of a number of Russian media in the EU as one of the sanctions measures in connection with the special operation carried out by Russia to demilitarize Ukraine. Von der Leyen said the ban will include RT, Sputnik and their subsidiaries. TikTok and Instagram accounts of these Russian media outlets have already stopped working in the EU, Meta will generally restrict access to them in the EU.The Netherlands blocked the sites RT and SputnikRussian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier that Moscow did not expect the West to impose sanctions on journalists, athletes, and cultural figures. The head of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation, Valery Fadeev, sent an appeal to the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Teresa Ribeiro, and urged her to take measures to comply with the norms relating to freedom of the press, due to the harassment of Russian-language publications. The situation with the Russian media in the West in recent years has become everything is more difficult. In November 2016, the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating the need to counter the Russian media, with Sputnik and RT named as the main threats in the document. A number of Western politicians, including US senators and congressmen, as well as the President of France, accused Sputnik and RT of interfering in the elections in the US and France, but did not provide any evidence. Official Russian representatives called such statements unfounded.
