OREANDA-NEWS. April 17, 2012. Dmitry Medvedev held a meeting of the working group to draft proposals for developing the Open Government system in Russia.

The President announced that he had signed an executive order on the creation of Public Television in Russia that will be launched on January 1, 2013 as part of the first multiplex (a set of free digital TV channels).

This is the fourth meeting of the working group. The previous meetings focused on the development of competition and entrepreneurship, combating corruption and human resources support for the civil service.

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PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Good afternoon,

This is our final Open Government meeting in the current configuration.

Let me remind you that about two months ago, I signed an executive order establishing a working group to develop the Open Government system and to draft proposals on the new cabinet’s ten priority areas.

I believe a great deal of work has been done. Let me remind you of the areas we have been working on so far: human resources, combating corruption and measures to promote competition. We held three separate and very substantial meetings devoted to these issues. When I say that they were substantial, I’m not trying to flatter anyone: the number of proposals submitted at each of these meetings was simply overwhelming.

I signed lists of instructions following each of the meetings. Some of them were very bulky in size, consisting of several dozen items. All that remains to do now is to wait until these instructions are executed. Some of these tasks must be carried out now, in the current configuration, whereas the others will probably be executed by the new Government.

The instructions focused on the main themes we had discussed: the state’s presence in the economy, improvement of legislation, including criminal and criminal procedure laws, human resources policies in the civil service, and other suggestions made by the experts.

I would also like to note that the Open Government forms new requirements to state officials. I hope that the solutions we have arrived at over the past two months will be in demand in the future, and not only at the state level, not only at the federal level, but also in the regions and cities, because it concerns the state system as a whole.

Our meeting today is devoted to a more practical matter and one that in my opinion is equally important. Today we will discuss the mechanisms of interaction between the Open Government and the Government of the Russian Federation, and, ultimately, the mechanisms of interaction between civil society and the state apparatus. I would like to hear your opinions on this issue, as well as your proposals. I have looked through them when preparing for this meeting and they are quite extensive as usual and very interesting. So, let’s talk about this but before we start our discussion I believe it would be right to begin our meeting today with an important announcement.

I would like to inform you that today I signed an executive order on the creation of Public Television in Russia, which will be launched on January 1, 2013. The executive order stipulates a number of measures designed to ensure that it will indeed be public, and not some other form of television (that is, it will not be a state television channel, in the narrow sense of the word, but a public television channel), as well as measures to protect it from undue state influence on the activities of this public institution, because the state has an impact on everything, but this impact must not be excessive.

We will also have to set up a mechanism for financing the Public Television channel. At the start, the Government will probably have to get involved by issuing loans, but later the loans should be replaced by an endowment fund, which will finance the television channel so that it will not have to turn to the state for help, which is probably the best guarantee – the best but not the only one.

The Public Television Council will be the main administrative body to be formed through the Civic Chamber and will represent all the political forces in Russia. Incidentally, this executive order states directly that civil servants, individuals holding public offices, including senior government positions, members of the State Duma and the Federation Council, and anyone employed by the state in one form or another cannot join the Public Television Council.

So, Russia will get a new mandatory free national channel de jure. I hope that it will provide fascinating viewing, at least for everyone who has an interest in public life, because people have different tastes and different ideas about what they would like to watch on television. Nevertheless, I hope that this channel will be interesting for a discerning audience.

I have also signed another executive order on including the new public television channel in the first multiplex, that is, in the first set of digital TV channels. The digitalisation of our television is currently in progress and will be completed by 2015. The inclusion of the Public Television Channel in the first multiplex, the first set of programmes, means that it will be available free of charge across our whole country.