The European Union office in Tirana has voiced concern about the political impartiality of the new members and chief of Albania’s main media regulatory body.
In a statement, it emphasized that “media regulatory authorities need to work impartially, transparently and with a legitimacy that is recognised by all”, and that “no doubt should exist about the non-partisan, professional & pluralistic nature of the work” of the institution.
“We invite the authorities to consider proceeding with this nomination under the new parliament starting in September, together with the appointment of the other board members of the Authority, in order to achieve the widest possible consensus and legitimacy,” the statement published on Twitter reads.
Albania’s parliament, currently controlled by the governing Socialists and their associates, is planning to elect a new Audiovisual Media Authority Board, AMA, where the main contender is Armela Krasniqi, a close associate of Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama.
BIRN has learned that the EU statement on Wednesday came after the Socialists spurned an EU private request to postpone the vote.
The AMA supervises the television and radio market in Albania. Rama attempted in 2019 to extend and empower it to supervise and order take-downs or fine online media, claiming it was needed to combat defamation.
The AMA is historically perceived as politically biased, as the members of the board are proposed by political parties. However, the possible election of Krasniqi, a known close associate of the Prime Minister, has raised hackles.
The political bias of AMA was one of the arguments provided by the Venice Commission against extending its power to supervise online media.
The so-called anti-defamation package was approved by the governing Socialists despite local and international criticism but has been blocked by President Ilir Meta’s veto.
Rama once claimed he had withdrawn the law proposal. However, no formal step to remove it from the parliamentary agenda has been undertaken, and the law is still listed as up for discussion.
At least 924 lawsuits against the media and journalists are active in Croatia, in which plaintiffs are demanding almost 78.5 million kunas in total, or some 10 million euros, which marks an increase in the number of lawsuits compared to last year, when the number was 905, the latest annual survey done by the Croatian Journalists’ Association, HND, reveals.
Hrvoje Zovko, HND president, said on Friday that such numbers “show that the judicial persecution of the media and journalists in Croatia is still ongoing and that there is no end in sight”.
He added “It is important to note that the actual number [of lawsuits] is higher because we received this data from only 23 media. We want to clearly warn the domestic and international public that lawsuits are the most common means of intimidating journalists and the media to give up serious investigative stories.”
He said that what was also particularly worrying is that top state officials, “local sheriffs”, and even judges are filing lawsuits.
HND reported that of the total number of 924 lawsuits, 892 are civil lawsuits for alleged violations of honour and reputation, conducted against publishers, editors and journalists for publishing texts and articles. The other 32 are criminal lawsuits.
The Hanza media group, to which the popular daily Jutarnji list belongs, reported 479 active court proceedings to the HND. Right behind is the Styria group, which publishes Vecernji list, with 203 lawsuits.
“Many of these proceedings involve SLAPP or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation lawsuits, aimed at censoring, intimidating and silencing critics by burdening them with court proceedings – a serious and dangerous mechanism that threatens media freedom,” HND said in a press release.
This is the third time that HND has carried out such research. Concerned about the number of lawsuits against the media, it asks local media outlets to inform them of the situation in their newsrooms.
According to the first HND’s poll, in February 2019, which drew responses from 19 outlets, there were 1,163 active court cases in Croatia. Warning about the dangers of this practice, in March that year reporters and media outlets staged a protest in Zagreb.
Last year’s data showed 905 such cases.
As BIRN reported, many governments in the region, in trying to control the pandemic narrative, adopted draconian tools, muzzling media, arresting critics and bombarding social media giants with requests to take down posts and shut down accounts.
In its November 2020 COVID and Free Speech report, the Council of Europe rights body cautioned that restrictions introduced during the pandemic could give rise to an increase in civil lawsuits, particularly defamation cases.
The International Press Institute said on Tuesday that it has joined four other media watchdog organisations in writing to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to express concerns over a decline in press freedom in Slovenia since the government of Janez Jansa came to power.
“We believe the repeated denigration of journalists, combined with the ruling party’s attempts to exert greater control over the country’s public service media, are creating an increasing hostile climate for critical reporting which serves its fundamental role of holding the government to account,” the five organisations said in the letter.
They claimed that as prime minister, Jansa has increasingly employed “Trumpian style tactics” of attacking journalists on Twitter and dismissing critical reporting as “fake news”, but warned that these attacks “go well beyond mere rhetoric”.
The letter was signed by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the European Federation of Journalists, OBC Transeuropa and Reporters Without Borders as well as the International Press Institute.
The Slovenian Government Communication Office, UKOM, faced strong criticism in February after it announced that it will suspend payment for the services provided by the Slovenian Press Agency, STA in January – the second time it has suspended the state-funded STA’s payments in recent months.
In the coming months, the media watchdog organisations’ letter said, the European Commission must respond publicly to any future attacks on the media by Jansa.
“It is vital for press freedom and democracy in the EU that Slovenia does not follow further down the illiberal path forged by Hungary and Poland,” they stated.
The problems facing media freedom in Slovenia, together with the situation for the press in Poland and Hungary, was discussed at the European Parliament’s plenary session last week.
Jansa’s policies could attract greater international attention in the second half of this year, when Slovenia will hold the presidency of Council of the European Union.
Jansa denies restricting media freedoms, and wrote a letter to von der Leyen in late February to insist that the allegations are “absurd”.
Hungary’s last independent radio broadcaster Klubradio lost its battle to stay on the air on Tuesday, as the Metropolitan Court of Budapest confirmed the decision of the government-controlled Media Council not to renew its licence, meaning the radio will be forced to move online from February 14.
The move is seen as the latest step to curb critical voices in the Hungarian media by the autocratic government of Viktor Orban, which since coming to power in 2010 has set about co-opting or killing off critical media outlets, shrewdly concealing most as neutral business decisions. This has drawn sharp criticism from the European Union and media freedom watchdogs.
Klubradio has long been in the crosshairs of Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. The last time its licences had to be renewed, it had to battle for two years through the courts.
Due to its critical tone, the radio does not receive any state advertising and so largely survives on donations from its listeners. It has a loyal audience of around 200,000, mostly in Budapest, as it can only be heard in the vicinity of the capital after being systematically stripped of its frequencies in the countryside, leaving Hungarians outside of Budapest with no independent radio to listen to.
Klubradio’s licence expires at midnight on February 14 and its journalists have been doing “survival exercises” in the last few weeks to train their largely elderly audience to switch to the radio’s online platform.
Klubradio called the verdict a political, not a legal, one. Andras Arato, president of the broadcaster, told Media1 that the verdict encapsulates the sad state of the rule of law in Hungary, which is such that a radio station can be silenced based on fabricated reasons.
Arato said it would challenge the verdict at the Supreme Court, while the CEO of the broadcaster, Richard Stock, would not rule out taking the case to the Court of Justice of the EU.
Opposition politicians slammed the government for yet another blatant move to restrict media freedom in Hungary. The chairman of the Democratic Coalition, former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, posted a quote from Orban in 2018 telling the European Parliament in Strasbourg that, “we would never dare to silence those who disagree with us”.
Gyurcsany retorted: “This government prefers silence – we have to end this paranoid system to regain free speech.”
The head of the International Press Institute (IPI), Scott Griffen, said before the court’s decision that, “these efforts by the Fidesz-controlled Media Council to block Klubradio’s license renewal are part of a far wider and calculated attempt to eradicate the station from the airwaves and muzzle one of the few independent media outlets in Hungary.”
Social media giant Twitter’s transparency report for the first six months of 2020 said Turkey continued to lead the world in terms of Twitter censorship in many categories, including the highest number of third-party takedown requests, court orders and accounts and tweets withheld.
Turkey had the highest number of combined requests including court orders and other legal demands, with 45,776 requests. It was followed by Japan and Russia, which made 45,776 and 30,436 requests respectively.
Turkey also at the top of the list when it comes to the number of court orders it sent to Twitter. It sent 6,513 such requests in the first half of 2020. Russia followed far behind with 2,972.
In other legal demands categories, meaning non-court order requests, Turkey again topped the list with 39,263 requests made in the first half of 2020, followed by Japan, which made 38,814 requests, followed in third place by Russia, which submitted 27,464 such requests.
Turkey also sent 347 information requests to Twitter, which did not comply any of them.
Turkey remains in number one place for the total number of accounts specified for closure/action under court orders and other legal demands. It specified 99,840 accounts for closure or other actions, followed by Indonesia, which sought action on 74,660 accounts. Japan came third, with 47,472 accounts.
In terms of accounts withheld by Twitter, Turkey again had the highest number globally with 2,501 withheld accounts, followed by Russia with 340 and India with 238.
In terms of tweets withheld by Twitter, Turkey was also number one globally, responsible for 12,135 of the total of 28,542 tweets withheld in that period. Some 42 per cent of all tweets withheld globally were from Turkey.
According to the Twitter report, 58 accounts of verified journalists and news outlets from around the world were subject to 333 legal demands in the period in consideration. Most of these legal demands originated either from India, 149, or from Turkey, 142 – together making them responsible for 291 of the 333 legal demands.
While Turkey leads in terms of Twitter censorship, and made the highest number of requests in several categories, it now aims to expand its control over social media companies with a new digital law.
Experts fear that if it does appoint an official representative to Turkey, as demanded, Twitter will have to respond more often to official demands.
“The removal of content rate [based on Turkey’s requests] was [only] 0.33 per cent for the first six months of 2020. Turkey wants Twitter to come to the country [in terms of a representative] for this reason,” Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish digital rights activist wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
“Coming to Turkey will result with Twitter becoming complicit in rights violations and would be against the current approach and policy adopted by Twitter regarding demands from Turkey,” Akdeniz added.
So far, only YouTube and Russia’s VK social media platform have appointed legal representatives to Turkey. Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has said it will not appoint a representative while Twitter is still undecided on the matter.
The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday condemned Romania for failing to uphold freedom of expression in the case of a local journalist who was fined by a domestic court over a series of critical articles about another journalist in the north-eastern county of Bacau.
“The case concerned the domestic authorities’ decision to order the applicant, a journalist, to pay damages for having published five blog posts criticising L.B., another journalist who was the editor-in chief of a newspaper in the Desteptarea media group and producer for a local television channel belonging to the same group,” the ECHR said in a statement.
The posts were published by Gheorghe-Florin Popescu in 2011. The same year, L.B. brought civil proceedings before a court in Bacau, which ruled that two of the articles posted by Popescu lacked any factual basis when describing L.B. as morally responsible for a murder-suicide.
The Bacau court also established that Popescu had used vulgar and defamatory expressions that affected L.B.’s honour and reputation, and ordered him to compensate L.B. with the equivalent of 1,100 euros.
Popescu subsequently appealed against the verdict, but Romania’s Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal as unfounded in 2013. The journalist then took his case to the ECHR.
More than seven years later, judges at the ECHR unanimously reached the conclusion that Romania breached Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression.
According to Tuesday’s verdict, Romanian courts failed to make “a distinction between statements of facts and value judgments” when examining Popescu’s criticism of L.B.
The verdict also said that Romanian courts ignored “the fact that the applicant was a journalist and that the freedom of the press fulfilled a fundamental function in a democratic society”.
They also ignored the fact that L.B. was a publicly known figure before the controversy involving Popescu, the verdict added.
The Romanian courts ruled that some of the content of Popescu’s articles was offensive, but the ECHR concluded that “although the satirical nature of the articles had been the main argument in the applicant’s defence, the domestic courts had failed to investigate with sufficient care whether or not this was a form of exaggeration or distortion of reality, naturally aimed to provoke”.
“In the court’s view, the style was part of the form of expression and was protected as such under Article 10, in the same way as the content of the statements,” the ECHR said.
Last year, Bosnian journalist Adnan Jasarspahic wrote an article for a local portal questioning the transparency of public sector recruitment in his municipality, Visoko, after the sister of the then mayor was hired by a municipality-owned company.
That Jasarspahic was sued by the mayor, Amra Babic, for defamation was one thing. That he had to move to the capital, Sarajevo, was quite another.
In Sarajevo, he said, “If you enter a lawsuit with anyone here, you’ll find someone to defend you.” Not so in towns like Visoko, a little over 30 kilometres northwest of the capital. “What’s it like in those small towns where the local sheriffs are masters of life, in charge of everything?”
“It’s not just about being sued and about defamation itself,” Jasarspahic told BIRN. “Things run deeper here. They mess with your family.”
Jasarspahic won the case, but the damage was done. Dozens of other journalists face similar challenges every year, sued for their reporting mainly by public officials in what media bodies say is a strategy of censorship, bogging down reporters in lengthy, costly court proceedings that make many think twice about digging into the affairs of prominent people.
According to an analysis conducted by the Bosnia mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, 80 per cent of cases were brought by public officials, ignoring the principle often cited by courts that such officials submit to a higher degree of public scrutiny and criticism.
This “should not be the case,” said Kathleen Kavalec, head of the OSCE mission. “Because these are exactly the individuals who should be open to public scrutiny and journalists who are doing their jobs, holding them accountable to the citizens who voted for them.”
The analysis found that 30 per cent of those cases dragged on for more than five years, prolonging the pressure on reporters and their media outlets.
Defamation suits are being “misused to prevent journalists from investigating certain topics or certain individuals,” said Sinisa Vukelic, director of the business portal Capital and a member of the Journalists’ Club of Banja Luka in northern Bosnia.
Lawsuits as ‘intimidation’
Adnan Jasarspahic, journalist. Photo: BIRN
In Jasarspahic’s case, Babic filed the suit even without first seeking a retraction. Jasarspahic said his article on Visoko.co.ba had simply stated the facts, as did the eventual verdict in his favour handed down by the Zenica Cantonal Court.
“You are a public figure, you spend public money, you exist in public space, you give statements in public space, but you act as if I entered your private space,” Jasarspahic told BIRN.
The storm the case kicked up in Visoko, however, made life for Jasarspahic and his family intolerable, prompting their move to Sarajevo.
Babic, the former mayor, declined to comment for this story.
Media and legal experts say it was far from an isolated case.
Defamation suits are “used for intimidation,” said Biljana Radulovic, a lawyer in the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina.
“Politicians are mostly those suing journalists with the excuse of protecting their reputation. They file lawsuits for protection from defamation, thus intimidating journalists with the enormous amounts being claimed and often won in court proceedings,” Radulovic told BIRN.
Adi Isakovic, a judge at the Municipal Court in Sarajevo, said the number of such cases grows during each election campaign and that their sheer frequency is concerning.
“The abundance of such lawsuits surely affects the independence of journalists,” Isakovic said. “If a journalist publishes a news item of public interest and gets sued for defamation, of course it will matter in the future when they publish their next investigative story that they think the public should know about.”
The growing rate of such lawsuits in recent years has led to the closure of a number of media outlets and brought others to the brink of financial collapse – Sarajevo’s Slobodna Bosna newspaper and Respekt weekly in Banja Luka among the most prominent examples.
“It was simply impossible to function within such a system,” said former Respekt journalist Zeljko Raljic, “because the judiciary is under direct political control, particularly over the last three or four years.”
Vukelic said smaller media outlets were particularly endangered given they lack the resources to fight off repeated lawsuits.
“They cannot endure the pressure,” he said. Such cases can encourage self-censorship among less experienced journalists, who might ask, “Why should I write about that topic when there are a thousand others I can address?” he said.
Years-long legal battles
Sejla Maslo Cerkic, a legal officer at the Human Rights Section of the OSCE mission in Bosnia. Photo: BIRN
When such lawsuits reach court, they can stay there for years, in some more than 11 years, said Sejla Maslo-Cerkic, a legal officer at the Human Rights Section of the OSCE mission in Bosnia.
“When cases and proceedings last this long, everything loses sense both for the party seeking protection of their reputation in court and journalists and the media outlets due to additional costs which they sometimes cannot cover,” Maslo-Cerkic told BIRN.
Court rulings are often inconsistent or contradictory, creating greater legal uncertainty for journalists, she said.
“Under our law, the burden of proving that something is true is placed on defendants, in this case the media or journalists,” Maslo-Cerkic said. “We have noticed that the standard, the scale set by the court for journalists and the media is set too high.”
Bosnian courts, she told BIRN, do not work according to the principle set by the European Court of Human Rights by which freedom of expression protects the expression of statements that may sometimes be “shocking, disturbing or embittering.”
Arben Murtezic, director of the Centre for Education of Judges and Prosecutors in the Federation, one of two entities that make up postwar Bosnia, also cited the inconsistency of court rulings in such cases, but was sceptical of any imminent change.
“It is hard to start harmonising practices without touching the basic principle of the judiciary, i.e. the independence of judges,” Murtezic said.
“Almost all defamation cases are different and special. Each of those cases, and I have really read many of them, has its own specific features and protected values and gravity and compensation amounts claimed … So, I think that hardly anything can be done in that respect.”
‘Hard to be a journalist’
Matt Field, British ambassador to Bosnia. Photo: BIRN
The situation appears even harder for female journalists, particularly in terms of the abuse they are subjected to outside the actual lawsuits.
“When we speak about the exposure of female in comparison to male journalists, I would say that women are far more susceptible to this and are mainly the subject of such sexual assaults,” said Leila Bicakcic, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in Sarajevo.”
The British ambassador to Bosnia, Matt Field, agreed: “The abuse that they receive is out of proportion with their male colleagues,” he said. “It is much more unpleasant, much more personal … It is not normal. It is not part of doing their job and we should not accept that.”
Besides training for judges and prosecutors, experts say there should be strict adherence to the standards set by the European Court of Human Rights.
“We know very well, as we have learnt in the last couple of decades, that journalism is an indispensable segment of democracy,” said lawyer Nedim Ademovic.
“However, journalism is a two-way street. On one side, journalists must be educated and learn about the professional journalism standards, especially ethics in journalism and legal standards, in order to eliminate a danger of lawsuits jeopardising their independence. On the other hand, the state and even business entities dealing with journalism must ensure that journalists will be financially independent, so the fear from lawsuits would not actually lead to their self-censorship.”
Jasarspahic, from Visoko, said he knew of dozens of journalists who had given up fighting defamation suits simply because of the cost involved.
“When a journalist enters a court proceeding, you are immediately down 2,500 marka [1,276 euros]. Lawsuit, response to lawsuit, hearings … All those things cost money,” he said.
“If you lack money to defend yourself, you lose. You defend yourself with your money. Public officials defend themselves with budgetary money… Let’s face it – it’s hard to be a journalist these days. Very hard. The only way out is by solving things institutionally.”
A group of media organisations has called on the new Montenegrin government to commit to reforms that will build and maintain media freedom.
Media Freedom Rapid Response, MFRR, the Southeast Europe Media Organization, SEEMO, and their partners published a report on Wednesday, demnanding protection of media freedom in Montenegro.
“It will take sustained and concerted efforts by Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic to improve protections for media freedom and the rule of law. They must devote particular attention to addressing the myriad problems faced by journalists and media workers in Montenegro,” said iNik Williams, coordinator at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, ECPMF, in a press release.
In parliamentary elections held on August 30, three opposition blocs won a slender majority of 41 of the 81 seats in parliament, ousting the long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS. After the election, on December 4, new Prime Minister Krivokapic, among other things, promised his government would restore and protect media freedom.
In the report, MFRR called for an end to impunity for crimes against journalists and media workers by ensuring police and prosecutors investigate all attacks and threats and bring perpetrators to justice.
It also called for establishing shared standards and principles for the regulation of the media market to encourage a fair playing field.
The report warned about the current ownership concentration of much of the media, saying management of state support funds and public advertising had been paired with a ruthless campaign against independent media.
The media organisations pointed to the prison sentence issued to the well-known investigative journalist Jovo Martinovic, calling it an attack on journalism. In a second-instance verdict, the court found him guilty of mediation in drug trafficking; he insisted he only met criminals for the purpose of his investigation.
“The new government should continue reform of the public broadcaster. It should start reforming journalistic source protection and, generally, ensure that all new or amended media laws are drafted in line with international standards and best practice on media freedom and pluralism,” the report said.
In its 2020 progress report on the candidate country, the European Commission noted a lack of media freedom in Montenegro, stressing that important old cases of attacks on journalists remained unresolved. The Commission warned also of the polarization of the media scene and of weak self-regulatory mechanisms.
“Concerns also remain about national public broadcaster RTCG’s editorial independence and professional standards,” the progress report said.
The report presents an overview of the main violations of digital rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia between January 31 and September 30, 2020, and makes a series of recommendations for authorities in order to curb such infringements during future social crises.
The global public health crisis triggered by the coronavirus exposed a new the failure of states around the world to provide a framework that would better balance the interests of safety and privacy. Instead, the report documents incidents of censorship, fake news, security breaches and concentration of information.
More than 200 pandemic-related violations tracked
At the onset of the pandemic, numerous violations of digital rights were observed – from violations of the privacy of persons in isolation to manipulation, dissemination of false information and Internet fraud.
BIRN and Share Foundation documented 221 violations in the context of COVID-19 during the eight-month monitoring period, the largest number coming during the initial peak of the pandemic in March and April – 67 and 79 respectively – before slowly declining.
The countries with the highest number of violations to date are Serbia, with 46, and Croatia, with 44.
The most common violation – accounting for roughly half of all cases – was manipulation in the digital environment caused by news sites that published unverified and inaccurate information, and by the circulating of incomplete and false data on social media.
This can be explained in large measure by the low level of media literacy in the countries of the region, where few people actually check the news and information provided to them, while the media themselves often publish unverified information.
The most common targets of digital rights violations were citizens and journalists. However, both of these groups were frequently also among the perpetrators.
Contact tracing apps: Useful or not?
The debate about the use of contact-tracing apps as a method of combating the spread of COVID-19 was one of the most important discussions in Croatia and North Macedonia.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, the Croatian government led by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, proposed a change to the Electronic Communications Act under which, in extraordinary situations, the health minister would request from telecommunications companies the location data of users.
Similarly, Macedonian health authorities announced they were looking to use “all tools and means” to combat the virus, with North Macedonia among the first countries in the Western Balkans to launch a contact-tracing app on April 13.
Developed and donated to the Macedonian authorities by Skopje-based software company Nextsense, the StopKorona! app is based on Bluetooth distance measuring technology and stores data locally on users’ devices, while exchanging encrypted, anonymised data relevant to the infection spread for a limited period of 14 days. According to data privacy experts, the decentralised design guaranteed that data would be stored only on devices that run the app, unless they voluntarily submit that data to health authorities.
Croatia launched its own at the end of July, but by late August media reports said the Stop COVID-19 app had been downloaded by less than two per cent of mobile phone users in the country. The threshold for it to be effective is 60 per cent, the reports said.
Key worrying trends mapped
Illustration: Olivia Solis
Bosnia and Herzegovina saw a number of problems with personal data protection, free access to information and disinformation. In terms of disinformation, people were exposed to a variety of false and sometimes outlandish claims, including conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus, its spread by plane and various miracle cures.
Conspiracy theories, like those blaming the spread of the virus on 5G mobile networks, flourished online in Croatia too. One person in Croatia destroyed their Wifi equipment, believing it was 5G.
In Hungary, fake news about COVID-19 arrived even before the virus itself, said journalist Akos Keller Alant, who monitored the digital environment in Hungary.
Several clickbait fake news sites published articles about COVID-19 victims a month before Hungary’s first confirmed case. The Anti-Cybercrime Unit of the Hungarian police arrested several people for spreading fake news, starting in early February when police raided the operators of a network of fake news sites.
In Kosovo, online media emerged as the biggest violators of digital rights by publishing unverified and false information as well as personal health information. Personal data rights were also violated by state institutions and public figures.
In Montenegro, the most worrying digital rights violations concerned privacy and personal data protection of those infected with the coronavirus or those forced to self-isolate.
The early days of the pandemic, when Montenegro was among the few countries that could claim to have kept a lid on the virus, was a rare moment of social and political consensus in the country about how to respond, said Tamara Milas of the Centre for Civic Education in Montenegro, an NGO.
The situation changed, however, when the government was accused of the gross violation of the right to privacy and the right to the protection of personal data.
Like its Western Balkan peers, North Macedonia was flooded with unverified information and claims shared online with regards the pandemic. Some of the most concerning cases included false claims about infected persons, causing a stir on social media.
In Romania, the government used state-of-emergency powers to shut down websites – including news and opinion sites – accused of spreading what authorities deemed fake news about the pandemic, according to BIRN correspondent Marcel Gascon, who monitors digital rights violations in Romania.
In Serbia, a prominent case concerned a breach of security in the country’s central COVID-19 database. For eight days, the login credentials for the database, Information System COVID-19, were publicly available on the website of a public health body.
In another incident, the initials, age, place-of-work and personal address of a person infected with the virus were posted on the official webpage of the municipality of Sid in western Serbia as well as on the town’s social media accounts.
In the report, BIRN and Share Foundation conclude that technology, especially in a time of crisis, should not be seen as the solution to complex issues, be that protection of health or upholding public order and safety. Rather, technology should be used to the benefit of citizens and in the interest of their rights and freedoms.
When intrusive technologies and regulations are put in place, it is hard to take a step back, particularly in societies with weak democratic institutions, the report states. Under such circumstances, the measures applied in one crisis for the protection of public health may one day be repurposed and used against other “social plagues”, ultimately leading to reduced human rights standards.
To read the full report click here. For individual cases, check our regional database, developed together with the SHARE Foundation.
Hungary’s Media Council decided on Friday not to automatically extend the licence of the government-critical Klubradio – the last remaining opposition radio station is Hungary, which only functions offline in the metropolitan area of Budapest.
Klubradio is one of a declining number of outlets that are critical of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz government, which since coming to power in 2010 has set about co-opting or killing off critical media outlets, shrewdly concealing most as neutral business decisions. This led to a number of press freedom, freedom of expression and journalistic organisations earlier this month urging the European Commission to act on several complaints that the Hungarian government has violated EU state aid rules as a means to undermine media pluralism.
The government-appointed Media Council argued that Klubradio had repeatedly violated the country’s media law, therefore its licence – due to expire on February 14, 2021– cannot be automatically extended. If Klubradio wishes to continue its service, the Media Council said it would have to apply for a new licence. Should its application for a new licence fail, Klubradio’s only option would be to broadcast online.
The Media Council did not specify exactly what they meant by violating the media law. Previously, the CEO of Klubradio, Richard Stock, denied to the Media1 news site that his station had committed any violation which could lead to the termination of its licence.
As Media1 reported, this is not the first time that Klubradio’s situation has been precarious. The Media Council has been trying to undermine the radio’s operations for years now, but Klubradio repeatedly went to court and won against the media authority. In a statement, Klubradio said it intends to continue using legal measures to stay on the air.
“The leaders and employees of Klubradio are looking for legal and other means in order to ensure that Hungary’s last independent radio, which authentically informs hundreds of thousands of people every day, is not silenced,” it said in the statement.
From the government’s side, there seems to be a conscious strategy to neuter the radio segment of the media. The Media Council decided to turn off DAB+ digital radio broadcasting in Hungary just last week, arguing that in the last 12 years there has been no real demand for this service. Gabor Polyak, from Mertek Media Monitoring, said in a recent interview that the government wants to keep a tight grip on the radio market. If digital broadcasting were still an option, the Media Council could not keep a monopoly on frequency licences.
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