Author: Eleni Stamatoukou

Aleksandar Sapic, the mayor of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, has filed two separate defamation lawsuits against BIRN Serbia, its editor and journalists, claiming that their reporting damaged his reputation and caused him mental anguish.

Sapic is suing BIRN Serbia, editor-in-chief Milorad Ivanovic and investigative reporters Jelena Veljkovic and Aleksandar Djordjevic for their reporting on his villa in the Italian coastal city of Trieste

He is also suing BIRN Serbia, Ivanovic and investigative reporter Radmilo Markovic over an article about the legalisation of extensions to Sapic’s mansion in Belgrade’s Bezanijska Kosa neighbourhood.

He is seeking six million Serbian dinars (around 50,000 euros) in damages in each case – a total of around 100,000 euros.

“By publishing falsehoods, the accused have caused irreparable damage to the plaintiff in terms of mental anguish due to the violation of [his] honour, reputation and human dignity, which called into question the plaintiff’s overall moral values, which he enjoys within a certain social environment,” both lawsuits allege.

BIRN Serbia editor-in-chief Ivanovic said the lawsuits were another example of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, SLAPPs, which are aimed at intimidating journalists and discouraging them from reporting about individuals and topics of public interest.

He added that court practice in Serbia shows that judges do not award damages in such large amounts as Sapic is seeking from BIRN, and that the aim of the mayor’s lawsuits is to expose the media organisation, its editors and journalists to financial costs in order to exhaust its resources.

“BIRN will continue to investigate topics of public interest, keep institutions, politicians and public officials in check, and publish stories that the public has the right to know about so that they can make informed decisions,” said Ivanovic.

The aim of SLAPPs is to drain the target’s financial and psychological resources and chill critical voices to the detriment of public participation, according to a report on SLAPP lawsuits in Serbia published in 2022 by Article 19, the American Bar Association Centre for Human Rights and the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia, NUNS.

A new report by BIRN Serbia and Civic Initiatives, “Publicly about Public Competitions: Overview of Project Financing in the fields of Media, Civil Society, Culture and Youth in 2022”, shows that Serbia allocated 6.8 billion dinars, equal to 58 million euros, on public competitions last year.

Through such public competitions, the state should support the work of sectors dealing with the protection of the public interest. For many organizations and media, this type of financial assistance is an important potential source of money.

This is why it is crucial that this money is spent in a transparent and responsible manner.

However, the research and data collected by BIRN Serbia showed that the opposite is happening; this year, as in previous years, procedural and administrative errors, abuses and non-earmarked spending of money, were all recorded.

“Essentially, there is no real support for activism. The most significant amounts of money are being misspent in the areas that should be priorities,” said Tanja Maksić, one of the authors of the report.

Stagnation and the accumulation of inherited issue problems are a key feature of the competition in 2022.

The main findings from the report are:

• Access to information in an open format improved compared to the previous research year. The researchers received more than half of the documents that the administration provided in Word or Excel format based on the request for data reuse.
• Although the government’s strategic goal is accelerated digitization of the public administration, only a small number of data sets on public competitions can be found on the open data portal (data.gov.rs).
• Administrative silence remains a big problem; one fourth of the institutions did not respond to BIRN’s request for data.
• The distribution of money through public competitions did not follow set priorities in public policies. For example, despite the proclaimed fight for the birth rate and women’s rights, research shows that it is in this area that some of the biggest abuses of money took place.
• Compared to previous years covered by the research, in 2022 there was an increase in total spending through public competitions. In 2021, about 5.1 billion dinars were spent; in 2022 this rose to 6.8 billion.
• The civil society sector got the most money (over 3 billion in 2022, i.e. 44 per cent of the total allocated money), and almost all institutions have developed models of cooperation with associations.
• Individual projects in the media sector were the most generously financed; the average value of these projects was twice as high as in other sectors.
• A large number of organizations and media regularly receive money; 2,814 are repeating from year to year.
• Regular activities are also covered by project financing – there were at least 308 projects in which the titles of the projects indicated the subject of financing of regular, annual activities of the organizations.
• The most expensive project in 2022 was awarded to Japi com company from Novi Sad, almost 48 million dinars for digitization of archival materials. Among the top winners in terms of the total amount of money in 2022 were also organizations that have been on this list for years – OPENS, Exit festival, and four regional TV stations whose editorial policy is close to the government (TV Novi Pazar, TV Belle Amie from Niš, VTV Subotica and TV Zona Niš).
• In the procedural sense, the biggest issue remains the lack of evaluation of what has been achieved, the publication of non-standardized and non-harmonized decisions on the allocation of funds, an inadequate appeals mechanism that cannot prevent abuses, and the non-transparency of the work of competition commissions, because documents on their appointment and work are almost non-existent.

BIRN’s previously published investigation showed that almost half of the money allocated by the Ministry of Family Welfare and Demography in the 2022 competitions – 1.3 out of 3 million euros – was allocated to a network of related organizations, and there are no results of their work.

“Some received per 30 million dinars (during 2021 and 2022), without knowing what they received the money for. We handed all the information to the Prosecutor’s Office and the police,” said Aleksandar Đorđević, one of the reporters that worked on the investigation, saying that the institutions must react and investigate possible fraud.

For the fourth year in a row, BIRN and Civic Initiatives have been monitoring the spending of state money through project financing, that is, competitions for the implementation of projects in the public interest.

The report was created on the basis of information from the database, which currently provides insight into over 22 billion dinars of public money spent at all levels of government in the period 2019-2022. It is the largest open database of this type.

Apart from BIRN and Civic Initiatives, 16 researchers from local civil society organizations participated in the research.

A court in Belgrade has ruled that when Predrag Koluvija’s attorney Svetislav Bojić told the journalist Jelena Zorić that “nobody did well who made a mistake about Koluvija”, this was not a direct threat to her life but a gross violation of the ethical code of attorneys – but one that this court would not deal with.

Koluvia, on trial for illicit narcotics production, has accused BIRN of incorrectly reporting a past case in which he was mentioned.

Dragoljub Đorđević, representing Zorić, said he believed extra-institutional pressure was exerted during the trial.

Bojić was acquitted on March 20 before the Second Basic Court in Belgrade of threatening the journalist, i.e. the crime of endangering the safety of journalists.

At the pronouncement, the lawyer for the accused also said that three days earlier, the Belgrade Bar Association had ruled that Bojić was not responsible for what he had said and would not be subject to disciplinary action either.

According to the indictment, Bojić threatened Zorić at the end of December 2020. The prosecution sought eight months of imprisonment or three years of probation.

It submitted a written statement to the court, which stated that the entire context in which the event took place should be taken into account.

Explaining the acquittal, Judge Dragana Branković said that what Bojić said did not represent a direct threat to the journalist’s life and body. She said Bojić had clearly violated the Attorney’s Code of Professional Ethics, but the court could not deal with that.

Đorđević, representing Zorić, told BIRN that he believed extra-institutional pressure had been exerted during that trial.

He said the court had “put full faith” in Zorić’s words but still found no elements of a criminal offence in what was said. He had gained a “painful impression” after the presentation of Bojić’s defence as well as during the presentation of the closing arguments.

“That man shows no remorse at all and still tells a bunch of lies. I think that he and his defence tried in every way to belittle journalist Zorić; they tried to humiliate her in some way, which left a very bad impression on me,” Đorđević said.

Zorić received other threats

Koluvija was charged by the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime after about 66,000 cannabis stems were found on the property of his company Jovanjica which weighed 1.6 tons after drying.

On December 28, 2020, Bojić approached Zorić while she was engaged in journalistic work with a cameraman and said: “Please be precise in your reporting, as my client Predrag Koluvija is an honest man and a great believer, this is what he told me when I went to visit him: ‘Zorić is destroying me and tearing me apart with her reporting, but I pray to God for her health, just as I pray for the health of the prosecutor Saša Drecun and the one who arrested him, Slobodan Milenković.’”

During the trial, it was also learned that the video recording of the conversation between Bojić and Zorić no longer exists, and so could not be part of the evidence.

Zorić reported the threats on December 29, 2020. Some 23 days later, on January 21, 2021, the prosecution requested the video footage from the Special Court building.

However, on January 25, the court responded that the footage had been stored for exactly 23 days, so they were unable to deliver it.

Đorđević said his client had received other threats as well. A photo of a pink piece of paper with a threatening message left in front of her apartment in January 2021 was shown to the court. It read: “This will go on until it’s over. You can’t escape from that”.

Đorđević noted that Zorić also received threats via social networks from Koluvija’s godfather and from his associate Sergej Mrđa while he was on the run, and for whom an Interpol warrant was issued for the Jovanjica case.

During the summer of 2022, during an appearance on television, while talking about the Jovanjica case, Zorić and her family, in this case her her brother, were also attacked by former Ministry of Interior State Secretary Dijana Hrkalović  who said she had heard from Zoric’s brother that she had had “problems in the newsroom” for allegedly covering up criminal correspondence.

Zorić: ‘Even in court, I knew the outcome’ 

Zorić said that she had expected the outcome. “Nevertheless, I reported the threats because as journalists we are obliged to fight for justice through institutions, even when we personally no longer believe in their work. From the moment I testified about the threats in the courtroom, and the judge asked me: ‘And why is that Jovanjica so important and you keep on writing about it?’ I felt what the outcome would be.”

Zorić added that “the most shameful of all is the move of the Belgrade Bar Association, which obviously knew exactly when the ruling would be handed down, so they decided exactly three days before not to impose a disciplinary penalty against their colleague”.

“All of this seems to me to be an institutional approval to attack independent journalism and stifle media freedom,” Zorić said.

After the parties receive the written decision of the court, the Prosecutor’s Office has the right to appeal; the injured party does not, because it is a proceeding conducted ex officio.

BIRN will monitor whether it appeals the court decision.