Attorney Seeks Amendments to Criminal Code To Make Indirect Threats to Journalists Punishable Offense

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Attorney Slobodan Beljanski on June 18 said that the Criminal Code, in the part referring to threats to journalists, should be amended to make punishable offense not only the directly made threats, but also those made “directly and indirectly.” 

Speaking at a panel of Media Week, held under the auspices of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Vojvodina, Beljanski said that the enemies of professional journalists in Serbia were their colleagues who served the regime and were using hate speech and who, according to him, did not deserve to be called journalists. 

“Those who are now attacking pro-democracy and critical journalists refer to freedom of expression in their defense,” Beljanski said. He added that the main issues concerned implementing law, noting that it was a matter of the independence of the judiciary and prosecutor’s offices from the regime and other centers of power. 

Veran Matic, chair of the Managing Board of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM), said that journalists had no trust in institutions and that out of some 30 reports made so far this year, only two had been resolved. 

Rade Djuric, a lawyer at the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia, said that “at the core of the problem is the question whether prosecutors are truly independent,” He added that generators of the bad atmosphere in the society, the consequences of which included attacks on journalists, were the executive branch representatives who “have huge influence” on prosecutors and police officers. 

Media Week is held as part of a project titled “Building resilience of civil society media to restore citizens’ trust,” organized by the Independent Journalists’ Association of Vojvodina and with the support from the EU Delegation to Serbia.