Dr. Karol Jakubowicz

Dr. Karol Jakubowicz is Chairman, Intergovernmental Council of the Information for All Programme, UNESCO. He worked as a journalist and executive in the Polish press, radio and television for many years. He has been Vice-President, Television, Polish Radio and Television; Chairman, Supervisory Board, Polish Television and Head of Strategic Planning and Development at Polish Television, and then Director, Strategy and Analysis Department, the National Broadcasting Council of Poland, the broadcasting regulatory authority (2004-2006).

In 2007-2008 he was member of the Council of the Independent Media Commission of Kosovo.

He has been active in the Council of Europe, in part as former Chairman of the Committee of Experts on Media Concentrations and Pluralism (1995-1996), Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the Standing Committee on Transfrontier Television (1995-2002), and as Chairman of the Steering Committee on the Media and New Communication Services (2005-2006).

He is also leader of Working Group 2 (“Democratic Performance of the Media”) of the COST A 30 Programme of the European Science Foundation.

He has been involved in policy-making and regulation in the field of broadcasting in Poland and internationally, through his contribution to writing Polan's Broadcasting Act of 1992, and its subsequent revisions, and to the revision of the European Convention on Transfrontier Television in 1998.  He has been involved in Poland's accession negotiations in the audiovisual area to the OECD and the EU. He was Polish representative to the Contact Committee, created on the basis of the “Television Without Frontiers” Directive, and to an EU working group on telecommunications and Information Society services. He was  also appointed by the European Commission to two focus groups, dealing with selected aspects of preparation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. Together with Dr. Sandra Bašić-Hrvatin of the Slovene Broadcasting Council he conducted a Peer Review on the Audiovisual Sector in Bulgaria, organized by the Technical Assistance Information Exchange Instrument of the European Commission (2005).

He has been a member of the Digital Strategy Group of the European Broadcasting Union and contributed to writing its report Media with a purpose. Public Service Broadcasting in the digital era (2002). He was involved in preparing the 2004 Final Report of the Working Group on Digital Terrestrial Television of the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities. He helped write the report Public Service Broadcasting in Europe which was adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Jan. 27, 2004.

As a Council of Europe, European Union and OSCE expert, he has taken part in many missions to advise on the development of broadcasting legislation in a number of countries and has written analyses of drafts or existing broadcasting laws in such countries as Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Italy,  He has also been a member of a team of experts which performed monitoring missions for the CoE Secretary General concerning compliance of CoE member States with their commitments in the area of freedom of expression and information.

In 1996, he led teams which prepared two reports for the European Commission: Access to the Media II Programme For Poland and Development of the Audiovisual Landscape in Poland.

His scholarly and other publications have been published widely in Poland and internationally. They include the books Rude Awakening: Social And Media Change in Central and Eastern Europe. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, Inc., 2007; Public Service Broadcasting: The Beginning of the End, or a New Beginning? (2007; in Polish) and Media Policy and the Electronic Media (2008; in Polish).