Tag: balkan insight

Turkey Arrests Journalists Over Reports on Turkish Intel Agent’s Funeral

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A court in Istanbul ruled on Sunday to arrest Murat Agırel, a columnist with Yenicag Daily newspaper, and Yeni Yasam managing editor Ferhat Celik and editor-in-chief Aydın Keser over news reports on the funeral of a high-ranking intelligence officer who was killed in Libya.

Turkish prosecutors in Istanbul had previously launched an investigation against the journalists for exposing the identity of a field officer with the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) who served and died in Libya, where Turkey has been supporting the government in Tripoli against a rival eastern faction.

OdaTV news director Barıs Terkoglu and journalist Hulya Kılıc were also arrested on Friday after the outlet ran a news report and images of the funeral in Manisa province.

The court also ruled to block access to OdaTV’s website.

The prosecutor’s office said the journalists revealed information on intelligence activities and documents and that they put intelligence officers’ families and colleagues in danger.

However, the name of the MIT agent had previously been announced by Turkish lawmakers in parliament.

“You cannot escape from the responsibility of what you have done with pressuring the media,” Faik Oztrak, a spokesperson for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), told reporters on Friday.

The CHP and other opposition parties condemned the court ruling as politically motivated and an attack on press freedom.

The arrested journalists are known to be critical of the Turkish government.

The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deployed troops to Libya to support the UN-recognised National Accord Government in the capital, Tripoli, against the Libyan National Army, which backs a rival interim government based in the eastern port city of Tobruk.

Critics accuse the Turkish government of hiding the real number of soldiers and other public officers killed in conflicts in Libya and Syria.

Turkish media previously reported that a high-ranking colonel in the Turkish army was killed in Libya but he was buried in Turkey without any ceremony in a bid to avoid public anger.

Eighty-four journalists are currently behind bars, making Turkey one of the biggest jailers of journalists in the world. Media watchdog Reporters without Borders ranks Turkey 157th out of 180 countries on its Press Freedom Index.

Since a failed coup in 2016, Turkish authorities have closed 70 newspapers, 20 magazines, 34 radio stations and 33 television channels as part of Erdogan’s crackdown on his critics.

Senator Sees China’s Hand in Central Europe TV Sale

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US Republican Senator Marco Rubio has asked the US Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General to launch “a full review of the national security implication of AT&T’s upcoming sale of the Central European Media Group Enterprises, CME, to the Czech-owned conglomerate PPF Group”.

AT&T is a US multinational telecommunications conglomerate and the largest shareholder at the CME. The owner of the PPF Group is Czech tycoon Peter Kellner, whom the Florida Senator accused of being a “China proxy”.

In 2018, Petr Kellner was set to buy Bulgaria’s largest media company, Nova Broadcasting, which owns some of the most popular commercial TV channels in the country, but the Bulgarian competition commission blocked the deal.

If PPF buys the CME, it will take control of popular TV channels in several Central European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia. It channels, including rating market leaders ProTV in Romania and bTV in Bulgaria, reach an audience of 97 million people, according to Rubio’s letter.

Rubio said this was potentially worrying. “The administration needs to conduct closer reviews of corporate deals like … [the] sale of CME, and understand how the Chinese government and Communist Party work through proxies like PPF,” he said.

Rubio, who co-chairs the Congressional Executive Commission on China, CECC, and is a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, warned of the threat that “the Chinese Communist Party’s political interference in foreign governments and societies” could pose to the countries where CME operates.

He argued that the sale would affect US national security, as Washington’s priorities include “preserving a free and open media environment overseas as well as preventing the Chinese Communist Party from subverting these platforms”.

US legislation authorises investigations of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers when “the acquirer is controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government” and when “the acquisition results in control of a person .. that could affect the national security of the United States.”

In Rubio’s view, the PPF Group already has “a record of acting as China’s proxies inside the Czech Republic” and its financial ties to China were clear.

“Approximately one-third of the PPF Group’s profits come from subsidiary Home Credit’s individual lending businesses in China,” the letter stated, adding that this “politically precarious business relies” on Beijing’s non-banking loans license.

The Senator claimed that Beijing uses the company to support “China’s malign activities abroad”. One example he cited involves Serbia, where he said that “PPF-owned telecommunications firms are working with Huawei to develop 5G networks”.

He also claimed that PPF subsidiary Home Credit “hired a public relations firm for 2,000 hours work devoted to manipulating Czech public opinion favorably toward China”.

This included “spying on Czech politicians, pressuring media to withdraw news articles critical of China and creating a new think-tank, Sinoskop, to employ biased analysts to influence public debate”.

Serbia Urged to Come Clean on Journalists’ Surveillance

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International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, RSF, has called on the Serbian authorities to investigate how much surveillance goes on in the country – after the Serbian news agency Tanjug on February 16 published a response written by the Defence Minister to a never-published opinion piece by a former defence minister.

The former defence minister and current opposition politician Dragan Sutanovac emailed his article on defence issues to the editor of the weekly Nedeljnik, Veljko Lalic, which decided not to run it.

RSF noted its concern that current minister Aleksandar Vulin felt able to respond to the unpublished material – and that he had said in his article that he was replying to the article Sutanovic had published in Nedeljnik.

On February 19, RSF’s European bureau chief, Pauline Adès-Mével, called on the Serbian authorities to investigate whether opposition politicians were being spied on.

“We are concerned that emails between opposition politicians and independent media outlets are being spied on and intercepted by the government,” Adès-Mével said.

“We call on the authorities to shed all possible light on this matter,” the press release added.

After the news broke, Vulin apologized to Nedeljnik and said he would ask the relevant bodies to look into the matter. Vulin’s staff later said its PR team had mistaken Nedeljnik for Kurir, a Belgrade-based tabloid that recently published an interview with Sutanovac.

But in his response article, Vulin only referred to Sutanovac’s comments about Serbia-Russia cooperation, which the unpublished piece contained, and was not mentioned in the Kurir interview.

Nedeljnik also said the authorities needed to find out whether any officials used the resources of the secret services to intercept emails between Sutanovac and Lalic.

“It is hard to believe that a person working constantly with the media, for example, someone in the defence ministry’s public relations department, would confuse the daily Kurir with the weekly Nedeljnik,” the weekly said.

This, however, is not the first time that concern about surveillance of politicians and journalists has arisen in Serbia.

In March 2016, the tabloid Informer published some of the findings of an investigation into the assets of Aleksandar Vucic – now president of Serbia, who was then prime minister – which the investigative website Krik had carried out but never published.

Serbia has been falling for years in the rankings of the World Press Freedom Index. It was ranked in 90th place out of 180 countries in the 2019 Index.

EU Court Rules Against Romania In Cyber Domestic Abuse Case

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A judgment issued on Tuesday by the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, ordered Romania to pay a victim of domestic abuse 10,000 euros for failing to protect her when police refused to investigate her husband for breaching her internet privacy. The court recognised this as one of “the various forms that domestic violence may take”. 

On 18 March 2014, the ruling recalled, newly divorced Gina-Aurelia Buturuga told the police that her ex-husband had accessed her email and Facebook accounts without permission. She had previously filed complaints against him, identified only as M.V. in the sentence, for domestic violence.

According to the judgment, Buturuga wanted the family computer examined after her former husband allegedly “made copies of her private conversations, documents and photos” that he found on her personal accounts.

But in June 2014, the police in Tulcea, eastern Romania, rejected the request, saying “that the information that might have been obtained was unrelated to the threats and violence charges formulated against M.V.,” the ruling reads.

In September 2014, Buturuga reported her husband to the police again for a “secrecy of correspondence violation”, and the complaint was registered and included in the investigation against her husband for alleged domestic violence.

However, the prosecution dismissed the case in February 2015, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove M.V. had subjected Buturuga to the physical violence she said she had suffered.

Alleged death threats were considered “not serious enough to qualify as a crime”. As for the “secrecy of correspondence violation”, prosecutors said it was not reported on time.

Before addressing the ECHR, Buturuga appealed to a Romanian court, which confirmed the prosecutors’ conclusion and also ruled that the material retrieved by her ex-husband from her social media accounts was already public when he accessed it. The case was closed without a court hearing and M.V. received a fine of 250 euros.

The ECHR concluded that the Romanian authorities failed to properly investigate the woman’s allegations of domestic abuse. It established that part of the information the ex-husband copied from her digital accounts was not public, as the Romanian judges had claimed. It said the authorities should have conducted a proper investigation to determine the nature of that information.

“The court considers that the authorities have shown excessive formalism in rejecting any connection with the acts of domestic violence which the applicant had already brought to their attention,” the ECHR said. “They thus failed to take into consideration the various forms that domestic violence may take.” According to the ruling, Romania has to pay Buturuga 10,000 euros in compensation for moral damage.

Questions Marks over Official Data on Turkish Economic Decline

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The official data makes for uncomfortable reading: central bank reserves down 11 billion euros over three years, 150 per cent knocked off the value of the lira, inflation at nearly 12 per cent, unemployment roughly 13 per cent and output contracting.

Yet some observers of the Turkish economy – rocked since 2016 by repeated political crises, strained relations with the West and military adventures in the Middle East – say the reality may be even worse.

“Economists are becoming increasingly suspicious about the economic data of the Turkish government,” said Caner Gerek, professor of economics at Kirklareli University near Turkey’s northwestern border with Bulgaria.

“The official numbers do not match the facts on the ground and in our lives.”

The Turkish Statistical Agency, TurkStat, and the Finance Ministry under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, are in charge of the data, “but the way the data is gathered and analysed is becoming very suspicious,” said Gerek.

Lessons from Greece


A seller writes new prices at a local bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: EPA-EFE/ERDEM SAHIN

Take inflation: shortly after TurkStat reported record high inflation in 2018, the agency’s head, Enver Tasti, was dismissed. Under his successor, the official rate fell significantly to 13 per cent.

Yet Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at John Hopkins University, said last year that the real figure was over 43 per cent.

The prices of the main commodities alone rose more than 30 per cent last year; electricity and gas were up 32 per cent and prices of food in supermarkets soared 50 per cent.

Enes Ozkan, an economist at the University of Istanbul, said Turkey would be wise to learn from the mistakes of neighbouring Greece, which plunged into crisis in 2010 when it revealed a massive budget shortfall. The European Union criticised “severe irregularities” in Greek accounting.

“The Greek economy is still recovering and Turkey must take lessons from it,” Ozkan told BIRN.

“Unfortunately, government officials at every level are manipulating the economic data and using it for their own political propaganda.”

Ibrahim Kahveci, an economics columnist at the Turkish daily Karar, said there had been a significant drop in consumer spending and that it did not match the government’s official data on inflation.

“Perhaps TurkStat official do not believe that economist can cross check the data,” Kahveci wrote.

Unemployed or not


Faik Oztrak. Photo: Wikimedia commons/Hilimi Hacaloglu 

According to TurkStat, the number of unemployed Turks increased by 817,000 between September 2018 and September 2019 to a total of 4.56 million. The unemployment rate rose 2.4 per cent to 13.8 per cent; even worse among the young, at 26.1 per cent.

But again, experts believe that official figures downplay the problem given the extent of the economy’s contraction.

The economy contracted 2.6 in Q1 2019 and 1.5 per cent in Q2. There was a slight recovery in Q3, but the economy remains in recession and the downward trend is expected to continue in 2020.

According to Deutsche Welle Turkish, almost 900 companies, including a number of Turkish industrial giants, filed for bankruptcy in 2019 alone. More than 2,000 have done so in the past two years, according to the January report.

Critics have also picked up on the method of measuring unemployment: according to TurkStat, 630,000 women who were previously counted as part of the labour force opted to stay at home in 2019, excluding them from unemployment figures.

Only in December 2019, 145,000 women left the labour force, leading to questions from experts and opposition parties. The number of people who have ceased actively seeking work also increased to 668,000, again removing them from the unemployment rate.

Faik Oztrak, deputy leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party told a news conference in January that the data made no sense.

‘If you can’t measure it…’

Gerek, the economics professor, also questioned the data on Turkish Central Bank reserves, which were used to defend the lira. Gerek cited “serious economists” suggesting reserves had hit “a very low level”.

A poll conducted by AREA Research Company found that 61.6 per cent of Turks believe the state of the economy will worsen further in 2020, potentially putting further pressure on Erdogan after the loss of Istanbul and other cities to the opposition in local elections last year.

Ozkan said trust was key to a healthy economy, but that the gap between the official data and the facts on the ground was widening.

“The current manipulation of the data causes irrevocable damage to the Turkish economy,” he said.

“You can escape from facts but you cannot escape from its consequences.”

“Even people who never follow any economic data now do not trust the data of the Turkish government.”

“As Lord Kelvin said, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” Ozkan said, referring to the 19th century Scottish mathematician and physicist William Thomson.

“If you measure the deteriorating figures wrong it means that you will also apply the wrong policies to recover.”

Serbia’s Independent N1 Portal Buffeted by Cyber-Attacks

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N1 said the latest attacks happened last Thursday when a paid DDoS strike from China hit the Serbian website twice that day.

The attacks started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday afternoon. The second attack was five times stronger, with up to 300,000 access requests hitting the portal server a second.

The Independent Association of Serbian Journalists, NUNS, urged Serbia’s High-tech Crime Prosecutor to urgently discover who was behind the attacks.  

They come after a row erupted between the owner of the N1, United Group, and state-owned Telekom Srbija over broadcasting rights. 

After the two sides failed to reach a deal, Telekom stopped airing N1’s programmes, causing a stir among the general public and the media community as N1 is among the few remaining independent TV channels in the country. 

Luxembourg-based United Group claimed the real reason for the shutdown was political pressure and an attempt to silence government critics and the free media. 

But Telekom Serbia denied this, arguing that an agreement was not reached because United Group proposed an extension agreement that was not in line with Serbian legislation. 

Support for N1 has meanwhile come from the European Federation of Journalists. “We see the state-owned cable operator’s decision to drop N1 TV as an attempt to silence a critical voice in Serbia,” it said. 

Several recent reports have highlighted the lack of media freedom and pluralism in the Serbia, where the media is now largely controlled by the government, it allies or its proxies. 

According to the latest annual report by the rights organisation Human Rights Watch, Serbian journalists continue to face attacks and threats, while media plurality has become compromised, with most media now aligned to the ruling party.

Pro-government media outlets frequently smear independent outlets and journalists, describing them as “traitors” and “foreign mercenaries”, the same report noted.

A recent report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford said the future of the independent media in Southeast Europe remained uncertain as a result of political hostility and ownership concentration under politically connected moguls.

Montenegro Detains Activist for Predicting ‘War’ on Facebook

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Montenegro’s state prosecution on Tuesday ordered civic activist Vesko Pejak to be put into custody for 72 hours for causing panic and disorder over a Facebook post predicting “war in Montenegro” – and for claiming that officials were provoking citizens who opposed the recently adopted law on religion.

The law has angered the largest faith group in the country, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and tens of thousands of people have been marching twice weekly in the streets in protest against it. 

The Serbian Church, SPC, says it is designed to strip it of its property and land, which the government denies. Opposition political movements are also regular participants in the anti-government rallies.

The Center for Investigative Reporting in Montenegro, CIN-CG, said that by arresting people solely for their thoughts, the government threatened freedom of thought and expression, which is one of the cornerstones of democracy. 

“We appeal to all actors in the public arena to take the greatest responsibility regard to the situation and not to exacerbate tensions,” the CIN-CG press release said.

“We urge the authorities to release Pejak and to no longer stifle freedom of speech and freedom of movement,” a member of the Alternative movement, Nikola Bezmarevic, told the media.

The main opposition group, the pro-Serbian Democratic Front also condemned the arrest. 

The government has been clamping down hard lately on activists spreading “panic” on social media.

On January 24 police detained a well-known pro-Russian journalist, Igor Damjanovic, over his conversation on Facebook with another person who then filed a case against him. Damjanovic claimed the real reason for his detention was not his verbal exchange on Facebook but his long record of anti-NATO activism, which has irked the government. 

On January 23 in a separate case concerning Facebook comments, police arrested Milija Goranovic from Niksic for allegedly insulting the country’s police chief, Veselin Veljovic. Media reports said Goranovic was fined 500 euros for telling Veljovic “not to talk rubbish” below a statement of the police director on Facebook. 

One day after Goranovic was arrested, the US ambassador to Montenegro, Judy Rising Renke, reminded the government on twitter that freedom of speech was fundamental to democracy. “This really worries me. Public figures are routinely criticized and even insulted – it’s part of the job. I know. However, at the end of the day, we must defend the right to free speech,” she posted.

Two editors of local news websites, IN4S and Borba, Gojko Raicevic and Drazen Zivkovic, were detained on January 12 on suspicion of causing panic and public disorder. This was in connection with reports of an explosion at the Villa Gorica, a building in Podgorica used by the government for receptions. After they published their stories, some regional media republished the alleged information. The police later denied that any explosion had occurred and said that a minor electrical failure had occurred at the villa, which was soon repaired. They said Raicevic and Zivkovic were arrested for publishing information that had alarmed the public without checking the facts.

On January 5, the editor-in-chief of the Fos media website, Andjela Djikanovic was placed in detention for 72 hours for “causing panic and disorder” after claiming in an article that the government might call on security forces in neighbouring Kosovo to help quell Serbian Church supporters’ protests over the new legislation on religion.

The government has defended its tough response, however, saying it is coming under a systemic and organized attack. On January 14, the Culture Ministry said that the country had become the target of an organised “disinformation campaign” since it adopted the new law on religion. Authorities say they are the victims of a coordinated campaign to spread fake news, organised by a number of media outlets in the country and the region that are spreading religious and national hatred and violence.

‘Teenage Porn’ Network Scandal Rocks North Macedonia

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The alleged founder of a social group called “Javna Soba” [Public Room], which is at the centre of a scandal in North Macedonia involving teen pornography, on Monday insisted that his original intention had been innocent.

This group, hosted by the Russian social network Telegram, hit the spotlight over the weekend after two news sites that managed to get access to the group reported that it served as an exchange for pornographic material – often from teenage girls.

The group originally had some 7,400 members, and according to the reports, in some instances, the group also contained the alleged identifies and even the phone numbers of the girls whose materials were shared, causing even greater concern.

“We wanted to make a group for sharing funny videos and in no case pornography,” the alleged administrator of the group who goes by the nickname “Medo” told local A1On news site, which broke the scandal in the first place.

But “things got out of control”, said the administrator, whose identity was not known to the news site, adding that ever since he had fruitlessly tried to close the group, although closing his personal account reportedly did not help.

The existence of this group, which cannot be joined without a direct invitation from a member, shocked North Macedonia over the weekend, raising concern about the safety of the private data of the children and teenagers, as well as about public morality.

A1On previously reported that it had spotted phone numbers listed in this group that were known to belong to local public figures.

On Sunday, the Interior Ministry said it was working on the case. “The computer crime and forensics sector has immediately contacted the ‘Telegram’ network in order to get the needed info on the functioning of this group,” ministry spokesperson Toni Angelovski said.

He urged people to report any misuse of photos regarding this and other possible cases.

Caretaker Prime Minister Oliver Spasovski told a press conference on Sunday that the group had only been formed recently, and had gained popularity very quickly.

“From the data I got from the Public Safety Bureau, a procedure has been launched … they are working on revealing the administrator and members of this group,” Spasovski said.

The head of the First Children’s Embassy – Megjashi, an NGO based in Skopje, Dragi Zmijanac, on Monday urged society to do more to prevent minors being abused.

“This is a moral degradation of the whole of society, where children are left on their own,” Zmijanac told the Sloboden Pecat news portal.

According to reports by A1On, the group is still active on Telegram, but since the scandal broke, under a different name – and with a drastically reduced membership.

Sergiu Bozianu: Moldova Still Doesn’t ‘Get’ Privacy Law

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Sergiu Bozianu, president of the Association for the Protection of Privacy in Moldova, told BIRN in an interview that respect for privacy remains a problem in Moldova, especially when it comes to the so-called force institutions.

The lawyer says the authorities should follow the European pattern and create a unique register of all intercepted ways of communication, surveillance or special investigative measures.

“Special investigative measures are of a secretive nature. Nobody must know them, or we won’t catch thieves anymore. But every special investigative measure should be recorded somewhere,” he says.

He also says that, after a time, if the prosecutors do not find anything about the person who was the target of the special measures, that person should be notified about the procedures.

When it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, Moldova, despite having adopted this European law, has implemented it in an ambiguous way, reflecting the fact that parliamentarians do not seem eager to take a strong stand on the matter.

In June 2019, in the last days of Pavel Filip’s Democratic Party government, an journalistic investigation done by media outlet RISE Moldova revealed that the Interior Minister had authorized special surveillance actions on 52 members of the pro-European opposition, civil society members and journalists.

The 52 were psychically monitored, their phones tapped and cameras and microphones were even installed in their apartments. These major violations of their private lives were justified by alleged suspicions that they were planning a coup.

“From what I know from the media – because there have been no official reactions – some criminal cases have started [on these cases of illegal surveillance],” Bozianu said.

“But given the level of public interest in this activity, the bodies concerned should come up with statements on the subject – to clearly state what was done, and what the results were,” he added.

Bozianu mentioned another big problem in Moldova on privacy, besides the questionable actions of the authorities.

“We are talking here about private security agencies and the detectives who confuse their security activity in the private sector with police interception,” he said.

Bozianu said members of private security agencies often do exactly what the police do, even though they are not allowed to, by law. “Usually, these are former police officers or secret service employees, and they do the same activities in the private sector after they leave the official system,” he explained.

Confusion about what law really says:

Moldova first adopted a law on the protection of personal data in 2007-2008, after it ratified Convention 108 of the Council of Europe’s 1981 treaty for the protection of individuals regarding the automated processing of personal data. This was replaced by the current law, Law 133, for the protection of personal data, that remains in force until now.


The Moldovan lawyer, Sergiu Bozianu, speaking at a conference about the rights to a private life in Chisinau, Moldova, September 18, 2019. Photo: Sergiu Bozianu`s Facebook account

But Bozianu said it was problematic that communication officers of state institutions in Moldova now often refuse to reply to media requests for information by misinterpreting the protection of personal data law.

“Lately, it has become fashionable to invoke the regime of personal data. But this does not mean that [information] should not be published and revealed, if the grounds are that it is of public interest or concerns public money and public offices. It must be published,” he added.

He also criticised the “selective justice” in the past years by which some TV channels seemed to have preferential access to the personal data of important politicians – usually political adversaries of the authorities, like the former jailed prime minister Vlad Filat, the archenemy of the oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc, who still owns the biggest media empire in Moldova.

The lawyer also argues that the present law has flaws, with high corruption trials mostly kept secret. “When it comes to the divorce of two spouses, everything is published, about how they cheated, with whom, if they got hit and so on,” he complained.

“Today, we have a major problem with the publication of court rulings. We publish data when it is not needed – and do not publish data when it is needed. Corruption cases are all anonymised,” he said.

For those who break the privacy law, there are five types of penalty, with a maximum fine of 15,000 lei [750 euros] applicable. Theoretically, prison is also possible, stipulated in Article 177 of the penal code on the inviolability of personal life.

However, while this article is taken from Russian legislation, the law on the protection of personal data was transposed from EU law, namely from Directive 9546.

“We have tried to make a hybrid that does not work,” he suggests. “We have introduced something with national specific [judiciary provisions], and from a predictable European act, have made an unpredictable law that is outdated and inapplicable,” he adds.

Moves to improve law stuck in parliament:

The General Data Protection Regulation came into force in Moldova on May 25, 2018. Bozianu has been fighting for amendments since then, but a bill with these amendments has now been in the parliament since 2018 – although it was won a positive vote at the first reading.


Moldovan deputies taking a vote in the Parliament. Photo: EPA/Doru Dumitru

“This bill is a very important one for us, because it comes with a new regulation in the field of data protection, and from a European perspective,” Bozianu said.

 The lawyer said it was imperative for Moldova to better implement all European law requirements, especially from the perspective of trade with EU markets. 

“We need to have a law that would give us fair competition in relation to other economic agents,” he says. “If a Moldovan company wants to enter the European market or provide services there, it must comply with European requirements regarding GDPR,” he stresses. 

Bozianu says Moldova must comply with European GDPR regarding social media accounts as well. He argues that if Moldovan citizens do certain actions on Facebook, they now risk being sanctioned under European GDPR.

 “European GPDR applies in many situations in Moldova … when we store in the cloud on Facebook’s server, we actually store in the EU,” he notes. “All the information about Facebook users is in the EU – and that is where the GDPR applies,” he concludes.

Corruption Fight Faltering in Balkans, Central Europe, Transparency Says

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Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia scored worst in the Western Balkan region with 36 and 35 points respectively, which put them in 101st and 106th place on a list of 180 countries.

Both declined from last year, when Bosnia was ranked in 89th place, with 38 points, and North Macedonia came in 93rd place, with 37 points.

Bosnia shares its 106th place with Albania, which also declined in the rankings. It came in 99th place last year.

Bosnia’s western neighbour, EU member Croatia, fell from 60th place last year to 63rd place in 2019, its score declining from 48 to 47 points.

The scores for its eastern and southern neighbours, Serbia and Montenegro, did not change.

Serbia, however, fell in the rankings from 87th to 91st place, while Montenegro slightly improved its position, moving up from 67th place in 2018 to 66th place in the 2019 list.

Moldova scored worst in the whole of Southeast and Central Europe. With 33 points, it ranked in 120th place on the list.

Greece, on the other hand, saw the biggest improvement in Southeast Europe, scoring 48 points and ranking in 60th place.

This year’s Transparency International report also compared the latest results with those from 2012. In that context, in the Balkans, Bosnia’s result again appeared concerning, revealing a consistent decline. “With a score of 36, Bosnia and Herzegovina significantly declined by six points on the CPI since 2012,” the report noted.

Turning to Bosnia’s specific problems, it noted: “The country also suffers from weak enforcement of campaign finance regulations. During the 2018 elections, political parties and civil society organizations raised concerns over voting irregularities, threats against voters, the misuse of public resources and unequal access to the media.”


Global Corruption Perception Index for 2019. Photo: Transparency International

The organisation divides all countries into six geographical groups: Americas, Western Europe and the EU, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific.

It then measures perceived levels of corruption in each state and awards points from 0 to 100. A score of 100 points means “very clean” and 0 means “highly corrupted”. Based on the score, TI then compiles a ranking list.

Lidija Prokic, from Transparency International, told BIRN that the scores were in some ways more important than the ranking. “Rank is good in the sense that it gives us a picture of where a particular country stands in the wider and regional environment,” she explained. “But when we look at what is happening at a level of the country, it is more important for us to look at the score, because then we can see if there is any notable improvement or decline,” she said.

Prokic told BIRN that, on average, the group of countries containing the Balkans scored higher only than the African countries.

Looking at these countries as a whole, she said TI detected an overall declining trend. “We see a lot of effort to weaken the regulations that require disclosure of party campaigns [expenses],” she told BIRN. Efforts could also be seen to “bring money from unknown sources to political life”, she added.

“What certainly influenced the score is governments’ efforts to limit the space for civil society, limit the possibility for independent control and silence critical voices,” she added.

EU countries in Central Europe ranked higher than countries in the Balkans. Poland was ranked in 41st place, the Czech Republic in 44th place and Slovakia in 59th place.

But some EU member countries in Central Europe and the Balkans lagged far behind.

Hungary and Romania both came in 70th place and Bulgaria was even lower down, in 74th place.

As for the winners, there were few surprises. Eight of the top ten places on the list went to EU countries in Western Europe, namely Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Netherland, Germany and Luxembourg and also Switzerland and Norway.

The only two from outside the region were New Zealand and Singapore. All of them scored 80 to 87 points.

Prokic said that in the field of regulation and institutional integrity, those countries were still in a better position than many non-EU states, but the trends were worrying.

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