Worrying news from the UAE

I'm very concerned about reports coming from the UAE that GEO TV has been given 48 hours to leave Dubai where it produces a good deal of programming for its audiences in Pakistan. It seems that the Dubai authorities have said GEO will lose its licence to operate in Dubai if it does not take two programmes off the air. Capital Talk and According to Me are the two programmes identified as being at the root of the problem.

This isn't the first time GEO has suffered in Dubai. During the state of emergency imposed late last year, GEO was told to stop broadcasting from the UAE. At the time GEO said that it would relocate its international operations to Hong Kong if the UAE government continued to hassle it. I suspect the move may come sooner than later.

My concern is that many international broadcasters are moving all or part of their production facilities to other countries - the BBC World Service is moving many of its Hindi- and Urdu-language staff to India and Pakistan, for example - and this means that pressure can be exerted locally to force "unwelcome" programming to be dropped. Responding to a letter in this week's edition of Ariel, the BBC staff newspaper, Behrouz Afagh, head of the World Service Asia-Pacific region, said: "As for the BBC partnership in Pakistan, our editorial independence and integrity is not and was never under any threat, and our FM bulletins are going out live now, in any case." He's confident there's no problem. Perhaps this latest news from Dubai will cause a reassessment of the situation.