Conference on Safety of Journalists: Police Increasingly Brutal toward Press

Veran Matic(BETAPHOTO/MEDIJA CENTAR BEOGRAD/MO)

Over the last months police have begun to behave more aggressively toward journalists reporting from public gatherings even when they clearly wear press identification and vests, participants in a conference in Novi Sad said on Oct. 20.

The conference on the safety of reporters locally was organized by the ANEM Association of Independent Electronic Media and the OSCE Mission in Serbia.

Veran Matic, head of the board of governors of ANEM and a member of a working group for the safety of journalists, said the first nine months of the year had seen as many as 320 reports of various forms of threats, pressure and violence according to the database of the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia, while last year there had been 168 such reports, ANEM said in a press release.

Matic also said that, in the same period, 94 cases were opened according to the records of the Attorney General's Office, "with more than 20 assaults by police officers on media workers in the course of the year", compared to a total of 62 last year.

"Journalists have become open targets, not just for thugs and parapolice forces, but for the police, too. Attacks on journalists are obviously a political decision geared toward intimidation and removing as many journalists as possible from the field," the press release quoted Matic as saying.