A TV crew of the “Traces Remain” investigative show of Bulgarian National Television, BNT, were attacked on Tuesday, June 14, on a road in front of the Podvirovi mine near Bosilegrad in southeast Serbia, Safejournalists organization reported on Wednesday.
The journalists came to Serbia to do a story about environmental pollution in the border area in the municipality of Bosilegrad.
Safejournalists said in a press release that when the journalists and activists approached the mine, about 50 meters from the entrance a minibus blocked their way, so they had to continue on foot.
“At that moment, six or seven people, including the director of the mine, attacked the crew, first by throwing rocks at them and then by punching,” it said.
Miodrag Vukajlovic, the mine director from Bosil metal company, was identified as one of the attackers, along with his chief of security, BNT said.
BNT reported that the Consul General of Bulgaria in Nis, Dimitar Canev, came to the site and, with his help, a report was submitted to the police in Bosilegrad.
The TV crew included journalist Bogdana Lazarova, cameramen Dimitar Slavov and Nikolai Andreev and technician Robert Vecov. Green activists from Sofia Dimitar Kumanov and Valentin Janev, Branko Mitov and Dimitar Dimitrov from Bosilegrad were also present.
The Media and Law Studies Association, MLSA said in a report published on Friday that internet freedoms continued to decline in 2021 due to increasing censorship and surveillance.
“While 1,593 of the blocked URLs contained news articles, a total of 49 news websites were banned during the monitoring period, some even more than once,” the report said.
“The project’s findings bring to light that 53 per cent of blocked news articles pertain to information directly related to Turkish President and AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his family, and to mayors or officials of the AKP,” the report added.
According to Mumtaz Murat Kok, project and communications coordinator at the MLSA, the situation is not getting any better in 2022.
“The results of this report, which covers a period of only one year and reveals the dimensions of digital censorship in Turkey, becomes much more frightening when considered together with the ‘disinformation bill’ submitted to parliament very recently,” Kok told BIRN.
The new disinformation bill currently waiting to be considered by parliament makes ‘disinformation’ a crime that can lead to a jail term and paves the way for an even more repressive and coercive media environment, he said.
“As the report reveals, there is the intent to strengthen censorship practices that currently aim to protect a certain group and further violate the public’s right to receive information. In a country where there is almost absolute uniformity in media ownership, social media – on which many journalists rely on to report and many citizens rely on for news – is also being stifled,” Kok said.
The report also recommends that awareness of censorship and surveillance should be increased and social media platforms should bear the responsibility of being ‘media’.
According to a report published by Google covering data from the first six months of 2021, Turkey requested the removal of a total of 4,776 items. The majority of the requests were made on the grounds of ‘defamation’.
Google removed 1,686 of these items for legal reasons and 219 for company policy reasons.
“Considering the censorship practices that the government aims to increase, and that social media companies have so far submitted to the demands of the government without resistance, I think the next report [by the MLSA for 2022] will not be a more pleasant report,” Kok said.
The Montenegrin Supreme Court said on Thursday that prominent investigative journalist Jovo Martinovic, who was convicted of drug trafficking in a case that has sparked criticism from the EU, should be retried for a second time.
“The decision has been made and at the beginning of next week, [the case] will be returned to the lower court,” the Supreme Court told daily newspaper Vijesti.
In the second-instance verdict in the case in October 2020, Montenegrin Higher Court found Martinovic guilty of mediation in drug trafficking and sentenced to a year in prison.
Martinovic said he will continue to try to prove his innocence.
“Unfortunately, in Montenegro, it is not up to the prosecutor to prove guilt, but up to journalists to prove their innocence. This retrial could be good for media freedom and I will continue to fight,” Martinovic told BIRN.
He was arrested in October 2015 alongside 17 others from Montenegro in a joint police operation conducted with Croatian police. He spent almost a year-and-a-half in custody before being released in January 2017 ahead of the trial.
He was convicted in the first-instance ruling in January 2019 of drug trafficking and membership of a criminal organisation but the Appeals Court overturned the verdict and ordered the first retrial.
The journalist always insisted he had made contacts with alleged drug traffickers only as part of his legitimate reporting work.
Martinovic made contacts with two of the 17 suspects arrested in 2015: Dusko Martinovic – no relation to the journalist – and Namik Selmanovic.
Dusko Martinovic, the main suspect in the case, was also a convicted member of a gang of jewel thieves known as the Pink Panthers. Operating in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, they are believed to have stolen hundreds of millions of euros’ worth of jewellery. Journalist Martinovic worked with Dusko Martinovic on a series of TV shows about the robbers produced by Vice media group.
He worked alongside Selmanovic when a French production company, CAPA Presse, hired them to contribute to research on a documentary about weapons smuggling.
Dusko Martinovic was sentenced to six years and three months in prison in January 2019. Selmanovic has turned state’s evidence.
The European Commission’s report last year about Montenegro’s progress towards membership warned that the conviction of the journalist raises concerns about reporters’ ability to perform their duties professionally and without fear of legal repercussions in the country.
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), together with 72 NGOs and professional bodies, on Wednesday sent an open letter to the European Commission demanding it withdraw proposed child abuse legislation and replace it with a provision that secures privacy, security and free expression for all.
The European Commission published on May 11 new draft legislation, called the CSA Regulation, that aims to prevent and combat child sexual abuse. Under the proposal, private message services (like WhatsApp and Signal), web-based emails, social media platforms, app stores, image hosting providers and others would be liable for obligations to scan, filter and/or block content – including encrypted messages.
“When you fundamentally undermine how the internet works, you make it less safe for everyone. If passed, this law will turn the internet into a space that is dangerous for everyone’s privacy, security, and free expression. This includes the very children that the legislation aims to protect,” the 73 civil society and professional groups wrote in the open letter to the EU Commission.
The CSA Regulation would cause severe harm in a wide variety of ways, the groups argued.
The new regulation would force private technology companies to put communications and materials that citizens share under surveillance, which would have a direct impact on respect for the privacy of every citizen, while also leading to a restriction of freedom of expression in digital communications, these groups argued.
“The provisions of the proposed legislation for the restriction and suppression of child exploitation material on the internet, while dealing with such an important issue, fail to safeguard the protection of all of us in the digital space and put the privacy of our communications in immediate danger,” Homo Digitalis, a Greek digital rights NGO that co-signed the open letter, told BIRN.
Journalists and human rights activists would see their communications monitored under the new law, which the EFJ argues “could jeopardise the fundamental protection of journalistic sources.”
“This will put in immediate danger not only the continuation of their important work, but even their personal safety, in cases of authoritarian regimes. We are already seeing important facts coming to light that show that journalists are being monitored illegally, even in Greece. Imagine the direct impact that the imposition of this legislation will have on the entire journalistic field, on human rights lawyers, etc. It will give the tools to authoritarian governments to put – legally now – any control over the internet,” said Homo Digitalis.
In Greece, in November last year, the Greek journalist and BIRN contributor Stavros Malihoudis, as well as human rights activists found themselves the targets of surveillance by the country’s National Intelligence Service. Recently, the Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis, a financial editor for CNN Greece and a regular contributor to local and international outlets including the Financial Times and CNBC, found that his mobile phone had been surveilled by Predator spyware.
Montenegrin Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic on Friday said the government is ready to ask foreign experts to help solve the failed investigation into the murder of the editor Dusko Jovanovic 18 years ago.
The editor-in-chief and owner of the daily newspaper Dan, well known for his opposition to the then government, was shot dead on leaving his office in Podgorica on May 27, 2004. He had received numerous death threats.
Abazovic called on the Special State Prosecution to reopen the investigation and find the preparators.
“The government is ready to accept international expertise, which is one of the possibilities… The people who can still testify in this case should get some status of cooperated witnesses and do what they should be doing,” Abazovic told the media.
In 2009, a former karate champion, Damir Mandic, was sentenced to 30 years for the killing, but the verdict was overturned in 2014, forcing a new trial. That ended in 2016 with a 19-year sentence.
Jovanovic’s family and their lawyers say Mandic did not act alone and that the circumstances of the murder have never been fully clarified, nor the masterminds brought to justice.
On Friday, Jovanovic’s sister, Danijela Pavicevic, said that family members were already contacted by the state prosecution.
“The former authorities and prosecutors didn’t show any will to solve this murder, but the attitude of the new prosecutors towards this crime gives us optimism,” she told the daily Vijesti.
Last May, former Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic and then Deputy PM Abazovic vowed to solve the killing, expressing full support for the work of a special commission created under a previous government in 2014 to monitor investigations into such attacks.
Members of the new Commission, led by the program director of Vijesti, Mihailo Jovovic, are journalists, media and NGO representatives, and from the Interior Ministry, police, State Prosecution and National Security Agency.
Jovovic said the commission had already determined irregularities in the murder investigation, stressing that they will continue working on the case.
“I am sure that hiring an expert, foreign or domestic, would help the Commission to determine what was wrong from the very beginning of this ineffective investigation,” Jovovic told BIRN.
In last year’s progress report, the European Commission said Montenegro had made only limited progress in addressing violence against journalists and media, adding that an effective judicial follow-up of Jovanovic murder remains to be ensured.
A new set of laws, which includes 40 articles, was represented to Turkey’s parliament on Thursday, aiming to increase government control over the internet, media and social media.
The law was prepared by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP and its far-right partner, the Nationalist Movement Party, MHP.
The new law, which is expected to pass soon, for the first time defines the crime of “spreading misinformation on purpose”.
It criminalises “a person who publicly disseminates false information regarding internal and external security, public order and the general health of the country, in a way that is suitable for disturbing the public peace, simply for the purpose of creating anxiety, fear or panic among the people”, the draft law explains.
According to the proposed law, persons who spread misinformation may be jailed for one to three years. If the court decides that the person spread misinformation as part of an illegal organisation, the jail sentence will be increased by 50 per cent.
Journalists may also be charged under this new law if they use anonymous sources for hiding the identity of the person who spreads the misinformation.
The draft law was condemned by experts and journalists’ unions.
Journalists unions in a written statement on Friday, including the Journalists’ Union of Turkey, TGS, the Journalists’ Association and the International Press Institute’s Turkey Committee, said that, “concerned that it may lead to one of the most severe censorship and self-censorship mechanisms in the history of the republic, we call for the immediate withdrawal of this bill, which seems to have been designed to increase the pressure on journalism, not ‘fight against disinformation”.
The new law also allows internet media to register as periodical media publications. This will allow internet media to enjoy some of the benefits of traditional media, such as advertising and press cards, but brings more government control.
Internet media will be required to remove “false” content and must archive their publications, and the government may block access to their websites more easily.
“On the request of the ministries, the President [of the Information and Communication Technologies Authority] may decide to remove the content and/or block access to be fulfilled within four hours regarding broadcasts on the internet,” the new law said, citing national security and public order.
It also creates new regulations on official press cards, after Turkey’s Council of State, the highest administrative legal authority in the country, cancelled the previous law in April, 2021, citing risks to press freedom.
The regulations created by the Communications Directorate, which is under the control of the presidency, allowed the government to cancel the press cards of journalists seen as unfriendly to the authorities, critics claimed.
Since they were introduced, a large number of independent journalists have had their press cards cancelled or their applications for renewal denied.
However, the new law brings little change, beyond creating a new board to decide on press cards. The Press Card Commission will have nine members, which will include government officials, academics and journalists’ unions but five members will come from the Communications Directorate, holding a decision-making majority.
An Albanian journalist said police stopped him from working on Tuesday evening as scores of violent fans from Dutch football club Feyenoord clashed with the police.
“I was photographing [the violence] when police officers stopped me, saying, it wasn’t allowed because it would damage the image of the country,” Shkullaku, an experienced photo reporter, told BIRN. “They demanded to delete the photos,” he added.
His protests, including the fact that he is accredited to UEFA and had his badge clearly visible, didn’t help.
“I had to call police spokesperson Gent Mullai to complain so that he clarified matters with the police. However, they still obliged me to delete some of the photos, claiming their faces were visible,” Shkullaku added.
Mullai, the police spokesperson, told BIRN he was unaware whether an investigation has been opened in the matter. He said that the police were currently too busy to respond to further questions.
A spokesperson from the Agency for Police Supervision told BIRN they had started verification but said the journalist needed also to contact them to denounce the event.
This is not the first time that police in Albania have manhandled journalists on duty in the last two years. Albania has slipped down the rankings in the latest Media Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders, which cited various cases of police violence against journalists covering protests as one reason for the drop.
The Journalists’ Association of Serbia, UNS asked the International Federation of Journalists on Tuesday to adopt a resolution at its upcoming assembly to call on the Serbian authorities to ensure that the murderers of reporter Milan Pantic are finally found and punished.
In the draft resolution, UNS emphasised that 21 years on, an investigation by the police and the prosecutor’s office in the city of Jagodina has not brought the killers of Pantic to justice or identified those who ordered the murder.
Pantic, who was a correspondent for the newspaper Vecernje Novosti, was beaten to death on June 11, 2001 in Jagodina. During his long career as a journalist, he mainly wrote about high-level corruption cases in the town.
UNS expressed concern that the authorities do not appear to have taken action after information about the case was uncovered by Serbia’s Commission for the Investigation of the Murders of Journalists.
“We are concerned because the findings of the Commission to Investigate the Murders of Journalists have been submitted to Serbian official bodies and after that that there has been no progress,” says the draft UNS resolution.
Veran Matic, who co-founded the iconic Belgrade radio station B92 and is the chairman of the commission created in 2012 to investigate a string of unresolved murders of journalists, said last year that he has traced Pantic’s killing to his coverage of the privatisation of the Novi Popovac cement factory in the town of Paracin.
Matic said that what Pantic wrote “and what he would have written” about the sale had cost him his life.
“If I could, I would gladly tell you the names of all actors, but I still hope that a solution will be found for the case to be resolved,” Matic said in 2021 ahead of the 20th anniversary of Pantic’s death.
Pantic died eight months after the ousting of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, when a disparate coalition of reformers, nationalists and opportunists was wrestling with the legacy of a decade of war, sanctions and organised crime.
The annual assembly of the International Federation of Journalists will be held in Oman from May 31 to June 3 this year, and UNS will be represented by its board member Miljan Vitomirovic.
Reporters Without Borders’ 2022 World Press Freedom Index, published on Tuesday, says that over the past year there has been a large increase in “polarisation amplified by information chaos” – a phenomenon that has also affected the troubled media environment in the Balkans.
The international watchdog organisation says the information chaos is a result of “a globalised and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda”.
In the Balkans, the situation declined significantly in several countries including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Greece, according to Reporters Without Borders’ ranking system of 180 states worldwide.
However, other states such as Montenegro, North Macedonia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Serbia rose in the watchdog’s rankings – although it continued to highlight shortcomings in all Balkan countries.
According to Reporters Without Borders, press freedom in Greece suffered serious setbacks over the past year, with journalists regularly prevented from being able to properly cover issues from migration to COVID-19.
The assassination of veteran Greek crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz in April 2021 remains unsolved despite the government’s promise of a quick investigation.
Last year Greece ranked 70 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders report and this year it has been ranked 108, a fall of 38 places.
Albania fell 20 places in the Reporters Without Borders index, from 83 last year to 103. The report says that the editorial independence in the while journalists are being targeted by organised crime groups and even by police violence, and the state is failing to protect them.
Meanwhile, private media outlets are owned by businessmen who have links with politicians.
Bosnia and Herzegovina also fell in the rankings from 58 in 2021 to 67. The report says that the media operates in a relatively favourable legal environment but in an extremely unfavourable political and economic situation.
“Journalists do not feel protected while doing their work. There are large differences in media freedom and the quality of journalism across the country,” the report adds.
Romania fell by eight places to 56 in the ranking from 48. “Romania can boast of a diverse, relatively pluralistic media landscape that produces hard-hitting public interest investigations. Pressure from owners, lack of transparency in financing or market difficulties, however, hamper the reliability of the information,” the report says.
Several countries rose in the rankings even though problems persisted.
North Macedonia ranked 57, up from 90. But Reporters Without Borders notes that although journalists in the country do not work in a hostile environment, the “widespread misinformation and the lack of professionalism”, contribute to a decrease in trust in the media, which puts journalists at risk from threats and attacks.
“The overall environment remains favourable to press freedom and allows for critical reporting, although transparency of institutions is rather poor,” it adds.
Montenegro was ranked 63 out of 180 in 2022 compared with 104 the previous year.
The report notes that the country’s constitution and laws guarantee freedom of speech and expression, but press freedom continues to be threatened by political interference, unpunished attacks on journalists and economic pressures.
“After [former ruling party] DPS’s first loss of power in 2020, government pressure and attacks on journalists have somewhat weakened. However, there is a fear that foreign owners of certain channels will influence the editorial policies in the interest of other governments or their local political favourites,” the report says.
Moldova advanced from 89 in 2021 to 40 this year. However, the report cautions: “Moldova’s media are diverse but extremely polarised, like the country itself, which is marked by political instability and excessive influence by oligarchs.”
Photo illustration: Pixabay / AndyLeungHK
Bulgaria also scored an improvement from last year, climbing to 91 places from 112, but Reporters Without Borders says that the few independent voices in the country’s media work under constant pressure.
“Intimidation from politicians as well as administrative and judicial pressures against publishers and journalists are a common practice,” the report says.
The report says that Kosovo scored an improvement on last year, climbing to 61 from 78, but highlights that although the media market is diverse, its development is limited by its small size and strict separation along ethnic lines.
Despite improvements, the report says that Kosovo journalists “have been increasingly targeted by SLAPPs [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation] initiated by business groups and politicians”.
It also says that investigative reporters covering organized crime and corruption are regularly threatened.
However, it adds: “Online news portals include strong brands such as BIRN or Kosovo 2.0, the latter being one of the few media outlets publishing in both Albanian and Serbian.”
Serbia ranked 79 on this year’s Reporters Without Borders index, up from 93 last year. In a highly polarised political climate, according to the watchdog, “journalists are regularly subjected to political attacks instigated by members of the ruling elite that are amplified by certain national TV networks”.
“Neither politicians nor institutions, including the Regulatory Authority of Electronic Media (REM), composed mostly of individuals appointed by the government, have been willing to remedy the situation,” the report says
“In addition, journalists critical of the ruling party have restricted access to interviews with government representatives and to public information,” it adds.
It notes that many attacks on journalists remain unresolved, highlighting the case of the 1999 assassination of Slavko Curuvija, which is still waiting for a final court verdict.
Croatia also scored an improvement compared with 2021, jumping from 56 to 48 but the report cautions that “the government is failing to protect journalists against legal attempts to muzzle them, and against organised crime. The government itself represents a threat to press freedom.”
The report says that authoritarianism is gaining ground in Turkey, challenging media pluralism.
“With 90 per cent of the national media now under government control, the public has turned, during the past five years, to critical or independent media outlets of various political persuasions to learn about the impact of the economic and political crisis on the country,” it explains.
It notes that all possible means are being used to undermine critics in the Turkish media and the future looks gloomy with new elections coming next year.
However, Turkey scored better than in 2021 in the watchdog’s rankings, climbing slightly from 153 to 149.
Turkey’s main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has condemned a Turkish court ruling approved by the Turkish Justice Ministry which handed the Jamal Khashoggi murder case over to Saudi Arabia.
Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 when he visited the consulate to arrange his marriage papers.
Kilicdaroglu accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of putting “a price on our honour”.
“No matter what you believe, you cannot put a price on Jamal Khashoggi, who was the victim of a terrible murder on your land,” Kilicdaroglu, the president of social-democratic Republican People’s Party, CHP said in a video message on Twitter late Wednesday.
Kilicdaroglu said the decision was immoral.
“Morality is the state’s foundation. Those who buried Turkey’s honour in the Saudi Embassy’s garden shook the foundation of the state,” he added.
On Wednesday, the appeal against the decision to transfer the case, brought by Khashoggi’s fiancée Hatice Cengiz, was rejected by Ankara’s 14th Administrative Court.
“The Republic of Turkey cannot give up its sovereign rights in such a way,” Gokmen Baspinar, a lawyer for Cengiz, had urged in the appeal.
According to the T24 website, which has seen court documents, Turkey handed over the Khashoggi case to Saudi Arabia out of “international courtesy”.
The decision came at a time when Turkey wants to repair relations with Saudi Arabia. Erdogan will visit Saudi Arabia during Eid-Al-Fitr on May 2.
According to some observers, Saudi Arabia’s precondition for this improvement in ties was the transfer of the Khashoggi case.
With the Turkish Justice Ministry’s approval, a court in Istanbul on April 7 ruled that the case should be transferred to Saudi Arabia.
In 2019, a Saudi court sentenced five men to death and three others to various prison terms for Khashoggi’s murder but the death sentences were later changed to prison terms after Khashoggi’s son pardoned his father’s murderers.
Since the murder and an international outcry, Saudi authorities have claimed that Khashoggi was killed by a rogue execution team without the knowledge of top Saudi officials – a claim dismissed by experts and human rights organisations.
Turkey’s decision to send the case to Saudi Arabia shocked human rights defenders who said this would end all hope of justice.
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