The audiovisual policeman in Algeria announced on Tuesday that he had decided to close “immediately and definitively” a private television station after the broadcast of a program containing scenes deemed “immoral”.
The Audiovisual Regulatory Authority (Arav) said it had “noted violations of professional ethics by the channel + Al Adjwaa TV +”, in a press release broadcast by the official APS agency.
These “violations” are “mainly linked to the non-respect of the specificities of Algerian society, as well as attacks on public morals, through the dissemination of immoral content and scenes contrary to societal values”, added the gendarme of audiovisual.
According to local media, El Adjwaa TV broadcast an American film on Sunday evening containing scenes deemed “immoral”. These sequences, showing a man and a woman almost completely naked in the middle of lovemaking, have been widely commented on on social networks.
The private general-interest channel, which broadcast from London, acknowledged on its Facebook page that it had committed “a flagrant fault” and apologized to its viewers and to all the Algerians to whom it said its “farewell”.
In June 2021, Arav had temporarily suspended the private channel El Hayet TV following a lively historical controversy over the Emir Abdelkader, hero of the resistance against colonial France.
In 2012, a law put an end to 50 years of state monopoly on audiovisual. More than 50 private television channels have since emerged, but only six of them, under foreign law, have received provisional approval to open studios in Algeria.