Protest in Front of Parliament over Reality Shows

Savo Manojlovic (Beta/Dragan Gojic)

Representatives of the Association for Protecting Constitutionality and Legality assembled in front of the Serbian parliament on Dec. 23 to demand that MPs make up their minds about support to a proposed piece of legislation that would limit reality programming and to sacking all members of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media for promoting violence, hate speech and pornography, or stand as "accomplices in violence."

Association head Savo Manojlovic recalled that the proposed legislation had been sent to the parliament on Dec. 11 with 36,000 signatures of support.

He said the legislation was the people's demand to limit reality programming and introduce a half-hour program of culture for children and minors, and to remove all members of the Regulatory Body Council.

They prepared a survey for the MPs, asking them to state if they were for the legislation, or if they did not want to vote for the proposal, making them "accomplices to [the Regulatory Body] in the failure to act to prevent the perpetration of criminal acts."

Manojlovic told reporters that, after testimony by reality show participant Andjelina Nikolic of torture, infliction of injury, illegal imprisonment and sexual abuse, they felt the only reasonable solution was to adopt a law to limit reality shows and sack all members of the Regulatory Body Council.