Employees of Bosnian Public Broadcaster Protest before Parliament

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The employees of the Public Broadcasting Service of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BHRT) staged a protest in front of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina on Nov. 27 over the ignoring of legal obligations, non-enforcement of the Law on the Public RTV System of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the systemic undermining of the only public media service at the state level.

The general director of BHRT, Belmin Karamehmedovic, stressed that everything had so far been nothing but promises and that the agony of BHRT had been going on for years, reported the media in Sarajevo. He recollected the law from 2015 stipulating that BHRT is primarily financed from the fee, which is distributed so that this broadcaster receives 50 percent, and the entities’ broadcasters receive 25 percent each.

“In 2017, Radio Television Republika Srpska (RTRS) unilaterally, in violation of the law, stopped transferring the due part of the fee to BHRT and that is when the agony at the state level began for us,” Karamehmedovic said. He added that the accumulated debt amounted to BAM102 million (around EUR52.3 million), which has been confirmed by a ruling of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In his words, this calls for a new court process, which will take time, and BHRT cannot function because it is expected to abide by the law, which is right. However, in the context of abiding by the law towards BHRT, there were only promises “and the open statements by politicians that they do not pay the fee and that the public state broadcasting service should be shut down.”