The former dean of Romania’s Police Academy, Adrian Iacob, and his former deputy, Mihail Marcoci, have each received suspended prison sentences of three years for instigating a fellow officer to blackmail a journalist who had revealed corruption at the institution.
The pair will also have to serve 120 days of community work and have been ordered to compensate the victim with 80,000 lei (more than 16,200 euros), the Bucharest Court of Appeal said on Monday. The verdict is not final and can be appealed.
The threatening message was sent via SMS in April 2019 to the cellphone of Emilia Seran, a journalist with Romania’s publication PressOne who had exposed the dean’s plagiarism of more than two-thirds of his thesis as well as other similar cases among the institution’s professors.
“We are sending this message with the aim of preventing what will follow, everything depends on you,” the SMS began. “Stop all your ongoing activities… if you don’t want that a calvary [crucifiction] starts,” it went on.
Iacob and Marcoci resigned from the Police Academy soon after anti-corruption prosecutors started investigating them on May 24 in 2019 over the threatening message.
Sercan has continued exposing widespread plagiarism among the Academy’s top officials and professors. According to the journalist, 74.3 of the theses conducted at the institution between 2011 and 2016 are suspected of plagiarism.
The Police Academy lost its right to award doctorates in October 2020 by order of the Minister of Education, Monica Anisie, who also ordered a restructuring of the corruption-plagued institution.
On May 13 this year, the Minister of the Interior, Lucian Bode, announced the dismantling of the two doctoral schools within the Police Academy, which, he admitted, “have done great damage to the institution’s image”.
Bode also announced an overhaul of the Interior Ministry’s educational bodies that will include setting up two new faculties, one for police and another for firefighters, as well as the signing of new professors “with an unquestionable academic reputation”.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic drew condemnation on Thursday after he insulted reporters from the public broadcaster Croatian Radio Television, HRT, in the coastal city of Split, accusing them of being tricksters, mercenaries and an embarrassment to the country.
The Union of Croatian Journalists, SNH, and the local branch of the Croatian Journalists’ Association, HND, which gathers HRT reporters, said they “strongly condemned” Milanovic’s verbal attack and his “harmful generalization”, although they themselves “persistently warn of the dubious editorial policy and transparency” of HRT’s current and past administrations.
“Journalists at Croatian Radio Television do their job honestly and responsibly. Most are underpaid, with a salary lower than the Croatian average. They are not responsible for the editorial policy of people who are mostly appointed in agreement with the governing structures,” they noted.
Milanovic quarrelled with the reporters after being asked about Wednesday’s edition of HRT’s TV show Otvoreno [“Open”], which among others hosted law professor Zlata Djurdjevic, who is the president’s candidate to be the next Supreme Court president.
He accused Mislav Togonal, editor of Otvoreno, of having deceived Djurdjevic because he had included “a fourth person in the show, contrary to the agreement”, who is not a candidate for the post of Supreme Court president but who is Djurdjevic’s “colleague from the faculty with whom she is not in a good relationship”.
“Your colleague [Togonal] is an average trickster,” Milanovic told Ivana Silovic, an HRT reporter, in front of her colleagues.
He then asked another journalist if he was also from HRT, and when the journalist said he was, Milanovic said he wanted to talk to other reporters, calling HRT “disgraceful mercenaries”.
“You are usurping space, let [us hear from] other television stations … You are mercenaries of one [political] option, that’s a disgrace,” Milanovic said, suggesting that HRT was under the strong editorial influence of the ruling centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ.
“Do not be in solidarity with HRT, these journalists are the only ones who know that they will receive a salary,” Milanovic told the other journalists present.
HRT condemned Milanovic, describing the tirade as “an attack from a position of power on journalistic freedoms and on the editorial policy of the public media service”.
Having made a promising start to his five-year term last year, the President has turned many of his own supporters against him by engaging in verbal campaigns against all who criticise him.
However, some in the public share his belief that HRT is politically slanted, criticizing HRT’s editorial policy and claiming it censors its journalists and does not always act as a public service.
The SNH and HND said that if Milanovic really wants to warn about the situation in the public television, “those to whom it applies should be named” and that the two attacked reporters “certainly do not belong to them”.
Human rights and media freedom groups have sharply criticised a decision by a judge, Iliriana Olldashi, at Albania’s Special Court Against Corruption and Organised Crime, SPAK, to approve a prosecutorial request made last Sunday to seize any computer, mobile phone or other electronic equipment belonging to the online publication Lapsi.al.
Experts and rights organisations called it a blatant attempt to intimidate journalists in breach of their human rights and the principles of the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR.
Prosecutors launched an investigation after Lapsi.al revealed the existence of a massive database purportedly belonging to the ruling Socialist Party containing information on each voter, including background, voting history, family links or employment status.
Prosecutors ordered Lapsi.al to hand over the database but the editors refused, saying that could expose their source or sources.
“The intervention of the prosecutors and the court against Lapsi.al’s right to report on a matter of public interest is just another attempt by those in power to intimidate the media,” Flutura Kusari, a legal advisor at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, ECPMF, told BIRN.
“Instead of investigating the breach of privacy by the Socialist Party, they are attempting to intimidate journalists and their sources,” Kusari added, saying that the decision contravenes the standards of the ECHR.
Dorjan Matlija, a human rights lawyer in Tirana, told BIRN that the court decision was based on flawed reasoning.
“The prosecutors have other possibilities to investigate the matter based on the accusations of the opposition Democratic Party against Prime Minister [Edi Rama] and other officials,” Matlija said.
He added that before approving such a request, the court should have considered the need to protect the sources, an obligation deriving from several decisions of the ECHR.
In the latest such decision, published this month, Sedletska vs Ukraine, the ECHR ruled that an order to expose a source may only be issued after all other ways to investigate a matter have been exhausted.
Matlija added that the judge’s unexpected order creates ground for further violations of media freedom and could expose more than one source of information. “The order practically could end up shutting down the media outlet [Lapsi] by seizing all its equipment,” he added.
Andi Bushati, co-owner of Lapsi, told BIRN that prosecutors had not yet acted on the court order, and that in the meantime he had appealed the decision.
He said the prosecutors seem more eager to identify their source than interview Socialist Party officials over the database. “They seem more concerned in finding out who betrayed the party and not who stole the personal data,” he said.
Kusari, from ECPMF, told BIRN that they were informing Albania’s international partners about this and related issues. “We hope that international pressure will help halt the pressure against the media,” she said.
BIRN is advertising three positions, offering exciting opportunities to get involved in this unique new initiative.
Under the working name ‘Reporters’ House’, the museum and community space will be the first regional museum in the Balkans that tells the comprehensive story of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the wars that erupted as the unified state collapsed.
The museum space will offer a compelling, fact-based narrative but will not simply serve as a heritage venue of wartime history. We aim to create a contemporary, inviting, creative, inspiring and memorable place providing space for discussion, learning and growth.
We want to celebrate the journalists, photographers and media workers who courageously reported the war and its aftermath, exposing atrocities and serious human rights abuses while maintaining the highest professional standards despite the deadly risks they faced.
We want to highlight the untold or forgotten stories of solidarity, bravery and humanity in times of war, and to preserve the memory of the journalists who lost their lives in the Yugoslav wars. We also want to remember the darker moments for our profession, looking at how media were used for propaganda purposes, instigating hatred and division.
Many of the challenges that journalists faced during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have enduring lessons for media coverage of wars. At the same time, contemporary journalism faces issues of propaganda and disinformation that have been amplified by the online environment and social media.
This is why we also want Reporters’ House to serve as a community space for journalists to gather and discuss the critical issues facing the societies of South-East and Central Europe, exchanging ideas with experts from outside the region about the development of quality journalism and investigative reporting and the role of media in conflict and conflict prevention.
The space is located in Sarajevo, and will be renovated ahead of the planned opening in Spring 2022.
The opening date is symbolic as it will mark 30 years since the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which saw the largest number of media workers killed in Europe since World War II.
Sarajevo is also home to the regional office of BIRN, the first structured network of journalists from the former Yugoslavia who got together to report about the key issues that countries in the region were facing in the wake of the wars that accompanied the break-up of the country in which they were born.
The opening of the ‘Reporters’ House’ will also serve to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our regional Balkan Transitional Justice programme, a platform that ensures a regular, up-to-date flow of information about transitional justice issues in the region through our dedicated network of correspondents in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia and our contributors from other media outlets, civil society organisations, governmental institutions, academia, the cultural sphere and elsewhere.
Over the past ten years, we have reported from all the war crime trials that have been held domestically and internationally, we have revealed human rights abuses and help to locate war crimes suspects, and we have inspired and supported other journalists to report and collaborate on reporting projects about conflict-related topics.
We have also brought together various different interest groups to exchange views on transitional justice policies, and most importantly we have given a voice to thousands of war victims to tell their stories and demand justice. With the Reporters’ House in Sarajevo, we intend to take this work to another level and ensure that the issues and debates raised by the Yugoslav wars have a positive impact on the region’s future development.
Reporters Without Borders, RSF, released its annual Press Freedom Index report on Tuesday with a warning that media freedom has deteriorated across the world during the coronavirus pandemic, with governments using the crisis to assert more control over the press.
In 2020, there was a “dramatic deterioration in people’s access to information and an increase in obstacles to news coverage”, the RSF report says.
“The coronavirus pandemic has been used as grounds to block journalists’ access to information sources and reporting in the field,” it adds.
The situation deteriorated significantly in some countries in Central and South East Europe in 2020, says the report, which ranks 180 countries around the world according to their level of media freedom, evaluating media pluralism, independence from government, national legislation and how safe journalists are in each country.
In Hungary (92nd out of 180, down three positions from RSF’s 2019 rankings), independent media came under attack in 2020 from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which “continued to extend its hegemony over the Hungarian media landscape and inspire other European countries such as Slovenia and Poland”, according to the report.
Legislation passed to criminalise disinformation about the pandemic “threatened journalists with prosecution on charges of disseminating fake news and ‘blocking the government’s anti-pandemic efforts’ and imposed additional curbs on their already limited access to state-held information”.
Poland (down two positions at 64th), Slovenia (down four at 36th), Czechia (in the same position at 40th) and Slovakia (down two at 35th) suffered some of the same problems.
“After consolidating its control of the state broadcast media, the government [in Poland] is pursuing its ‘repolonisation’ of the privately-owned media with the declared goal of influencing their editorial policies or, in other words, censoring them,” the RSF report says.
The situation is possibly worse in the Balkans, according to the report.
“The various press freedom violations have contributed to a sharp deterioration in the EU/Balkans Abuses indicator. Acts of violence have more than doubled in the region, compared with a 17% deterioration worldwide,” it says.
In Serbia (in the same position at 93rd), President Aleksandar Vucic’s administration is setting an example for other countries in the region with increasing government control on the media, daily verbal attacks on journalists and legislation to limit press freedom during the pandemic.
“Serbia is a country with weak institutions that is prey to fake news spread by government-backed sensational media, a country where journalists are subjected to almost daily attacks that increasingly come from the ruling elite and pro-government media,” the report says.
“The government used the coronavirus crisis to pass draconian legislation – later repealed – under which journalist Ana Lalic was held overnight in a cell in April 2020 after being arrested at her home for a report about a local hospital,” it adds.
The government of Albania (up one position at 83rd) took control of two independent TV channels on the grounds that their owner had been charged with drug trafficking, while in Montenegro (up one at 104th), investigative reporter Jovo Martinovic has continued to be prosecuted on allegedly trumped-up charges.
In Bosnia (in the same position at 58th) and Kosovo (down eight at 78th), media remain divided along ethnic lines, like most other institutions in both countries. The report notes that nationalistic discourse increased in 2020, creating a hostile environment for press freedom.
In Croatia (up three at 56th), journalists who investigate corruption, organised crime or war crimes are often subjected to harassment campaigns, according to the report.
RSF notes that in North Macedonia (up two at 90) senior government officials continued to threaten and insult media outlets, while cyber-harassment and verbal attacks against journalists increased on social media.
In Bulgaria (down one at 112), the lowest EU country in the rankings, “the situation of the media is very worrying because no one is interested in investigating or condemning violence against journalists”, the report says.
In Romania (in the same position at 48th) and Moldova (up two at 89th), access to information remains a major problem for journalists, particularly during the pandemic.
Turkey (up one at 153th) has one of the worst record for press freedom not only in Europe but around the world.
“All means possible are used [by the Turkish government] to eliminate pluralism,” the report says.
It notes that the government controls 90 per cent of the national media, and uses severe censorship and discriminatory practices in order to marginalise and criminalise its media critics.
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.
Prominent Turkish writer and journalist Ahmet Altan has been released from prison after the Court of Cassation overturned the verdicts against him.
The decision came on Wednesday, one day after the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR said Altan’s imprisonment, which has lasted more than four-and-a-half years, violated his human rights. The ECHR also ordered Turkey to pay 16,000 euros in non-pecuniary damages.
“I do not know what my feelings are. I do not know why I am out. They sent me to prison without asking and now they released me without asking,” Altan told the press after this release.
The writer has been in an Istanbul prison since September 2016 on charges related to the failed coup attempt in July 2016.
He was arrested over allegations that he disseminated subliminal messages related to the coup attempt during a TV programme, as well as articles he had written criticising the government.
Altan denied the charges, which he and his lawyer insisted were politically motivated.
“This has been judicial persecution which lasted more than four years and seven months. Altan was held with a completely empty file,” Figen Calıkusu, his lawyer, told the press. “He was considered a perpetrator of the coup attempt for the articles he wrote,” Calıkusu added.
In 2018, Altan was sentenced to life in jail without parole for attempting to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The ruling has now been overturned by Turkey’s top appeal court.
Following the first verdict, Altan was re-tried and sentenced to more than 10 years for aiding the “Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation” or “FETO” for short.
FETO is the name given by the Turkish government for followers of the exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen. Ankara accuses Gulen and his supporters of orchestrating the coup. The US-based Gulen denies any involvement.
In 2019, Altan was briefly released due to the time he had served but re-arrested only after eight days because the prosecutor objected to his release.
Rights groups, opposition and journalists’ organisations have welcomed his latest release.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, said it welcomed the release of Altan and urged the government not to make the same mistake of rearresting him.
“Turkish authorities should not repeat the mistake of rearresting Altan as they did in 2019, and should allow him to live and work freely,” Gulnoza Said, head of Europe and Central Asia Program at CPJ, said.
“Altan should never have been arrested and should have been released years ago. Better late than never but let’s not shrug off how we got here – don’t reward hostage-taking.” Nate Schenkkan, Director of Research Strategy at the rights organisation Freedom House wrote on Twitter.
The head of the Albanian Media Council has criticised the behaviour of the Mayor of Tirana’s security detail after a video published by Ora News media outlet showed a journalist being physically stopped from putting questions to Mayor Erion Veliaj.
“Veliaj was holding a political event and after he finished he entered a cafe and we were waiting for him outside,” the journalist, Isa Myzyraj, told BIRN.
“As soon as he came out, I approached and asked a question that many are seeking answers to: what can you say about construction without criteria in Tirana? He meanwhile immediately started making accusations about the media executives where I work,” the journalist added.
“With an action that in my opinion … seriously violates freedom of the media, his companions not only obstructed me but held me by the hands and exerted physical pressure so I could not move until Veliaj got in his car and left,” he continued.
Koloreto Çukali, Head of the Albanian Media Council, called the action concerning.
“In the published videos, it is clear that the movement [of the journalist] was forcibly blocked by the individuals accompanying the mayor. The only ‘crime’ of the journalist was putting a microphone in front of Veliaj, a very normal practice in Western countries,” he told BIRN
He added that this is not good practice, especially when the questions were of clear public interest.
According to the 2020 report of media rights watchdog Freedom House, reporters in Albania have little job security and “remain subject to lawsuits, intimidation, and occasional physical attacks by those facing media scrutiny”.
Ora News is a local media outlet owned by Ylli Ndroqi. Its assets were seized by the prosecution on August 2020 under anti-mafia laws. The owner’s lawyer said the client suspected political motives behind the move.
Greek police are intensifying efforts to locate the perpetrators of last Friday’s execution-style” killing of the veteran crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz, shooting him dead outside his house in the southern Athens suburb of Alimos.
Investigators are leaning to the possibility that two different teams were involved in the street slaying. The first team likely monitored the reporter’s movements after he left STAR TV channel, where he had taken part in a daytime show, and then informed the second team, who waited in the area on a motorcycle and executed the crime.
A CCTV video camera appears to show two riders some seven minutes before the attack. The driver can be seen wearing a helmet while the second driver, who according to witnesses hopped off the bike and shot the reporter as he got out of his car, is wearing a khaki hoodie, sunglasses and a mask.
Karaivaz took a total of ten bullets, six in his chest. According to reports, he was also shot twice in his head, verifying a passersby’s testimony that, once he fell to the ground, he received the final hit from the assassins before they got away.
According to media outlet Kathimerini, police believe the Beverly scooter used in the attack had been stolen, and have created a log of motorbikes of the same type reported stolen from their owners lately.
Police have been also trying to locate the safe house of the perpetrators. Investigations are focused on hotels and Airbnb apartments in the southern suburbs of Athens, but also on recent arrivals at Greece’s airports and across the land borders. For the moment, the lead scenario appears to be that the two perpetrators were brought from abroad for the hit, and left afterwards.
On Saturday, the Prime Minister, Kiriakos Mitsotakis, tweeted: “The assassination in cold blood of Giorgos Karaivaz has shocked the entire society,” adding that he met with the Minister of Citizen’s Protection, Michalis Chrisochoidis, to urge him to help solve the case.
But Mitsotakis has received criticism for only responding to the news of the assassination some 24 hours after the attack. His tweet came hours after various media freedom watchdogs, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, and foreign officials, including the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had already condemned the attack.
Former prime minister and opposition SYRIZA party leader Alexis Tsipras also criticized the government, saying that “those who were campaigning for law and order have let the country be converted to a colony of organised crime and uncontrolled action of gang mafias”.
Speaking on TV, the deputy Minister of Citizen’s Protection, Lefteris Oikonomou, said a series of similar-style assassinations in the last three years suggested that some form of “open war” has been going on.
On the website bloko.gr that he founded and managed, which focused on crime and police authorities, Karaivaz had reported on more than ten assassinations that have taken place since 2018 and are attributed to conflicts between different gangs for supremacy. The authorities have been studying his laptop, his car and his mobile phone, reportedly also hit by a bullet.
Karaivaz’s funeral meanwhile took place on Sunday in Kallifytos, a village just outside Drama, where his only son, Dimitris, 19, said: “My father believed a lot in people and he loved them. He believed in a second chance”.
“Of course, we want the people that killed him to be caught, so that they will not kill someone else in future,” he added.
“But my father would forgive them for killing him, and would look for the reason behind this and wouldn’t want this event to terrorize society – a society that fights for freedom and equality,” he concluded.
Turkey’s Council of State, the highest administrative legal authority in the country, ruled on Thursday that stricter regulations on the issuing of press cards, introduced in 2018, contravene the freedom of the media.
The Council of State said that press cards cannot be cancelled for what it described as arbitrary and ambiguous reasons such as “conduct against public order or national security” and “behaviour that damages the professional dignity of journalism”.
“The criteria with regards to people who will be given a press card need to be put forward concretely; objective criteria need to be determined,” it added.
The regulations created by Turkey’s 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.
Independent media and experts have claimed that being granted press card and the benefits that it bestows has become a privilege of a small group of pro-government journalists. Benefits of a press card include early retirement, entrance to any event, free travel transportation within the city, and discounts on rail and air travel.
The Progressive Journalists’ Union, CGD, welcomed the court’s decision to overturn the regulations, which it said were “created by the government in order to punish journalists who are not close to it”.
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