KIEV, Aug. 16 – A Kiev court on Monday postponed for 10 days its ruling over television frequencies amid mounting criticism of Ukrainian authorities for alleged restrictions on the freedom of speech.

The Kiev Administrative Court of Appeals was supposed to decide on Monday whether two Ukrainian independent television stations must be stripped of the frequencies allowing them to expand in regions.

The stations, Channel 5 and TVi, are challenged by a rival media group owned and controlled by Ukraine’s security service chief Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy.

The stations lost one court ruling in June, but appealed the decisions hoping to reverse it. Analysts said the chances were slim for the stations to win the appeal because of a mounting administrative pressure that has been put in place.

The decision to postpone the ruling comes after a wave of international and domestic pressure on the authorities to stop restrictions on the freedom of speech.

Three Ukrainian television stations, Channel 5, TVi and Chernomorska, on Saturday went on a one-hour warning strike in protest of what they call encroachment on the freedom of speech.

Should the channels lose the frequencies, their expansion into Ukrainian regions would be reversed, effectively reducing their broadcast to few cities, such as Kiev.

That may undermine the channels financially by reducing their potential advertizing revenues, and may eventually trigger massive layoffs of journalists.

Opposition groups on Monday called for a special session of Parliament to be joined by European lawmakers to discuss the “destruction of three independent television channels.”

“The government continues its frontal attack on the last remaining bastion of Ukrainian democracy – the independent mass media,” Viacheslav Kyrylenko, the leader of the opposition For Ukraine group in Parliament, said in a statement.

The International Press Institute (IPI), the world’s oldest global press freedom organization, in an open letter to President Viktor Yanukovych on Wednesday, expressed concerns over “significant deterioration” in the press freedom in Ukraine.

The Vienna-based IPI is the second international media organization to issue the criticism in less than a month after the Paris-based Reporter Without Border had slammed the authorities with the same criticism on July 20.

Oksana Romaniuk, the representative of Reporters Without Border in Kiev, said the organization will soon release its annual report that will address the issue of freedom of speech in Ukraine.

“I think that Ukraine’s position in this rating will drop compared with previous years,” Romaniuk said. (tl/ez)