Montenegrin NGO announces plan to propose criminal law amendments increasing the prison sentences for perpertrators of ‘revenge porn’.
Criminal Law amendments containing stricter penalties for revenge porn will soon be proposed to the Montenegrin parliament, the Podgorica-based NGO Prima announced at a conference on Thursday in Podgorica. Aida Perovic, from Prima, called on the authorities to deal seriously with the problem of revenge pornography.
“Montenegrin authorities should be fully aware that gender violence and revenge pornography do not happen to someone else but are present in our country, especially due to the abuse of high-tech communication platforms. Law amendments that deal with this problem will be proposed to parliament,” Perovic said.
The UK government defines revenge porn as “the sharing of private, sexual materials, either photos or videos, of another person without their consent and with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress”.
The proposed Criminal Law amendments envisage up to two years in prison for those who make available to a third party a video, photograph, audio recording or file with sexually explicit content, without the approval of the person shown in the content. If the offence is committed online, the prison sentence would be up to three years.
Law amendments anticipate still stricter penalties if this crime is committed by an official, with a prison sentence of up to four years, or five years if the crime is committed online. According to the amendments, explicit material and referred devices will also be confiscated.
Under current Criminal Law, those who publish private material audio or video material without the approval of the person shown in the material face up to a one year in prison. If the offence is committed by an official person penalties range from three months to three years in prison.
Presented Police Directorate data show there were six criminal offences of revenge pornography in Montenegro between 2019 and now, while victims were mostly women and the perpetrators were men.
“The penalties should be as high as possible, so they should be prison sentences. It would also be preventive; the perpetrators would not easily repeat the crime and the potential perpetrators would be aware of the possible consequences if they commit the crime,” state prosecutor Biljana Pavlicic said.
Currently, no specific law in the Balkans addresses revenge porn, and the offence is sometimes tackled via other criminal offences, such as the unauthorized taking or publication of photographs. But in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, public prosecutors do not deal with such cases,. They must instead be brought via private complaints submitted directly to the courts. It is up to the victim to prove it happened.
Revenge porn became headline news in the Balkans in early 2021 with the discovery of at least three Telegram messaging groups on which tens of thousands of people were exchanging photos and videos of women and girls without their consent.
According to data that BIRN was able to obtain from October 2021, 263 complaints of unauthorised sharing of photos or videos were filed in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia between 2016 and 2020, resulting in 35 convictions. It is noty clear how many of those specifically concerned revenge porn.