Melis­sa Doughty

The Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) hopes to fi­nalise con­sul­ta­tions on the draft broad­cast code and present it to Min­is­ter of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Dr Ru­pert Grif­fith by June 30. He is the au­thor­i­ty's line min­is­ter.TATT's CEO Cris Seecha­ran, in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day af­ter the au­thor­i­ty's work­shop on IPV6 (In­ter­net Pro­to­col Ver­sion 6) at its of­fice in Barataria, said it was in its fi­nal con­sul­ta­tion on the mat­ter and com­ments were to be sub­mit­ted to it by May 10.

Af­ter the fi­nal con­sul­ta­tion, Seecha­ran said, the au­thor­i­ty would col­late the in­for­ma­tion, which should take about two months, and then the code would be sent to Grif­fith.He added that the code had been pub­lished on the au­thor­i­ty's Web site for com­ments from the gen­er­al pub­lic and rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers. Slight changes had been made to it af­ter con­sul­ta­tions ap­prox­i­mate­ly a month ago with the T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, he added.

The process of draft­ing a broad­cast code be­gan in 2008 and a draft was craft­ed in 2009. Three con­sul­ta­tions were held be­fore it was draft­ed. The process stalled when the PNM gov­ern­ment left of­fice. In 2011, TATT was asked by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment to re­vis­it the doc­u­ment. Civ­il groups and NGOs, such as Fix­in' T&T, called last year for it to be re­vis­it­ed and im­ple­ment­ed af­ter graph­ic im­ages of for­mer West In­dies crick­eter Runako Mor­ton's body were broad­cast.

Seecha­ran said the au­thor­i­ty hoped to see the code get­ting to Cab­i­net and Par­lia­ment by year's end.