TESLIĆ, 04.03.2019. – Steering Committee of BHJA strongly condemns the attacks on the journalist’s teams of BN TV from Bijeljina and the Alternative television from Banja Luka, that happened in Teslić during the shooting of events related to the vote on the revocation of the current mayor Milan Miličević. The BNTV team was attacked last night after the voting ended, when two political parties supporters come into conflict– SDS i SNSD, who are fighting for the mayor position in Tesliću. The mayor Miličević himself threatened the journalists from ATV while shooting statements for this media outlet, saying that „he wasn’t satisfied with the work of ATV “, and that this is the last statement for ATV, adding that ATV will no longer be able to enter the building of the Municipal Administration.

Ste Steering Committee considers exerting political pressure and violence against journalists as and inadmissible and uncivilized act, as well as question their free and safe work. Physical attacks and threats are a direct attack on freedom of expression and represent a violation of the right to inform citizens about matters of public concern. Responding to the referendum and voting results are an event of extreme importance for all the inhabitants of Teslić, which means that media and journalists must be allowed to be uninterrupted when working the public interest.

Steering Committee of BHJA requests from the police authorities in Teslić to take special measures for protecting journalists and media teams who report from this town, and from the Central Election Commission to sanction politicians who violate the right on informing with their acts.

BANJA LUKA, 21.02.2019.- Journalist of BN TV Vladimir Кovačević said today, at the beginning of the trial before the Banja Luka District Court, that during the attack on him on the 26th of August last year, he though the attackers will murder him.

The trial for one of the attackers – Marko Čolić (37) started today, while the second-accused in this criminal offence Nedeljko Dukić in in the run. An international warrant after him was issued.

Murder attempt

In the courtroom Kovačević told that before he was attacked in front of the building he lives in, he spotted two persons, with hoods on their heads, but their face was visible when they started moving towards him.

– It was not until I heard the sound of striping the sticks, I realized what was happening. But then it was already too late – Kovacevic said.They hit him, he says, and while he was still on his feet, only in the head. During the attack, he tried to partially defend himself, and he did not, he said, even get to “feel” the fear, reports Fena.

– I just thought ‘what’s going on, they’ll kill me.’ It was a classic fight to save my head. I started screaming … I felt the blood. They entered the car. I tried to see the plates, but I do not succeed because my glasses fell, “Kovačević said.

He added his ear was almost broken, as well as that his head was sewed hospital on several spots, and that he still had headaches that he had not previously had.

Čolić was identified in the police, while the motive of the attack is not yet known.

The indictment alleges that Kovacevic was attacked on August 26 at around 20.40 in front of his building in Banja Luka.

Specialist for forensic medicine Milan Srdić confirmed that Kovačević had suffered a severe injury of the forearm of the brain tissue, as well as several other minor injuries on the body.

– He got at least four strokes in his head and three on the body, with a strong swing of arm in which the subject matter was – said Srdic.

Expert Zoran Obradovic, head of the DNA laboratory at the Institute of Forensic Medicine Banja Luka, spoke about the DNA traces found at the site of the event.

Čolic’s trail was found, on the stick handle, and he underlined that, there is no possibility that Colic was never in contact with the object, and that his trail was transmitted by someone there.

“Smiling”

The judges warned Colic’s attorney Gordan Jovicevic, on several occasions for the way he talks to the witnesses and to the judges.

Jovišević and Čolić today requested his custody to be abolished and that he continues to defend himself from outside.

Čolić emphasized he spent several months in the Custody Institute Tunjice.

– I buried both father and mother while in custody. I didn’t cause any problems. I do not feel psychic  good. I don’t sleep – said Čolić, who was ever warned by the President of the Judicial Council Branimir Jukić at one point “not to smile” while Kovačević testified, on what he answered saying that he was “constantly in good mood”.

The Prosecutors objected to the request for termination of custody, and the Trial Chamber will make the decision on custody subsequently.

04.03.2019. – There are a number of things that my brothers and I no longer have patience for after our mother, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, was assassinated in a car bomb attack in Malta on October 16, 2017.

The first is small talk and the second is what I call ‘conversations that get you nowhere’.

The person I least expected to have both of these with is the president of an actual country. This is why my answer to all of the Serbian journalists and activists who’ve asked me what happened before and during the platform I shared with him in Davos a month ago is this: it was an opportunity that Aleksandar Vučić chose to waste. We’re going to force a proper conversation here instead.

Up until a few years ago, people of my generation in Malta knew nothing but peace and relative tranquility. We were too young even to fight for EU membership. My clearest memory from 2003, the year Malta narrowly voted to join the EU, is returning home from a friend’s house the morning after the referendum to find my mother waiting in front of the door of our family home, something she had never done. Her face was green, sick with the worry that the ‘Yes’ campaign had lost and that her children would be locked out of Europe for good.

The people of the Balkans fought and died for democracy and for basic freedoms, whereas ours ended up landing in our laps thanks to luck, circumstance and the efforts of our parents.

Malta’s first ever NGO dedicated to investigative journalism was launched as a response to the major corruption scandals under our current prime minister, Joseph Muscat. In comparison, investigative journalists in the Balkans practically invented the field and today you have the highest concentration of brilliant journalists in the world (no thanks to your governments).

Our newest activists are fighting hard against a state that is doing everything it can to crush even the basic right to protest. Unlike you, we’re still learning to fight. You don’t need anyone to teach you how to do it. But I can offer a warning, as a voice from a bleak future that will be yours if you stop fighting, stall, or put false hope in membership of the European Union.

My personal experience with Malta, the island where I was born and the country that my mother died for, is that no country should rush into the Union before it’s ready. It’s tempting to push for membership as a quick fix for a country’s political problems, but as the assassination of my mother and the mind-bending corruption that enabled it shows, these problems can grow. European Union membership has increased the prize of corruption but none of the checks to hold it back.

The government of Malta continues to either ignore, cover up, or frame the assassination of my mother as an aberration, as though she were run over by a bus and not executed in broad daylight in front of our family home, using half a kilo of TNT packed into a complex, remotely controlled device under the seat of her car, as she drove to the bank to try and gain access to her accounts, which had been frozen by the Economy Minister.

Her assassination is the result of a sudden, deliberate destruction of the rule of law in Malta that began following the election of Joseph Muscat in 2013, first as a way of enabling corruption, then as a way of enabling impunity for corruption once exposed by my mother, then as a way of enabling impunity for her assassination.

You don’t have to take it from me: the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy has just given us our lowest ranking ever for the second year running, just 14 years after joining the EU. We are now classed as ‘partly free’ within the Economist’s Free Speech Ranking.

We’re tasting the bitter fruit of structural problems that no one in Malta’s previous government, and no one in the European Commission, thought to cut at the root before we joined the European Union.

Pay close attention: reform once a country is already in the EU has proved impossible so far, which is why Serbian civil society actors like KRIK only have now as a window of opportunity to shape their country’s institutions and politics before the country joins. If Serbia doesn’t reform them, as difficult as it is, civil society should never fall for Vučić’s blackmail of supporting a quick accession process, as change becomes harder or impossible afterwards.

With no executive or judicial authority over citizens and only Europol, which combines structurally ineffective state-level police forces, Europe has become a playground for the organised criminal groups that were previously confined to state borders in Malta and Serbia.

Our prime minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, was an insignificant bank clerk in the nineties. EU membership, and the election of his childhood friend Joseph Muscat, put him in a position where he was able to corrupt a billion-dollar deal for the purchase of gas, backed by European banks. Another friend of the prime minister, Neville Gafa, went from selling spectacles on the minimum wage to operating a multi-million euro Schengen visa sales racket from behind a government desk. Not only have they escaped prosecution: they still work for the prime minister.

Corruption of this scale was unknown in the Malta where I grew up – until it blindsided us. If you are already experiencing anything close to it before EU membership, then it will hit you worse in Serbia. Like us you’ll eventually reach a point of no return: the cash and market opportunities for corrupt politicians and criminals that flood in after membership will enable a venality so deeply rooted that it is impossible to remove, unless you kill the whole system and start from scratch.

But unlike us, you have a lever over both your government and the European Union. The message you need to send them is that you won’t join until both reform. The EU must become capable of containing and eliminating organised crime and corruption operating across and within member states, something which it is not currently even remotely capable of. And Serbia must show a willingness to reform its own systems of government. Civil society should use this small window to propose specific institutional reforms and gain the support of the European Commission to compel reform in Serbia. If it does not, then the opportunity will be lost forever.

Maybe one of you will lose your life in the process, as my mother has hers, but if you don’t use this window you will all lose your country.

Imagine that: a candidate country from the Balkans saying it will only join if the EU becomes better at fighting organized crime and corruption.

PRISTINA, 03.03.2019 – OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Harlem Désir, together with OSCE Ambassador Jan Braathu, hosted an official dinner, where were invited President of AJK Gentiana Begolli Pustina and Board Member of AJK, Leonora Dalipi.

During the meeting they discussed about the media freedom in Kosovo, safety of journalists, latest developments in the public broadcaster (inclusion of RTK employees into the wage law) and many other concerns that journalists and other media workers in Kosovo, face in general.

Begolli Pustina besides the aforementioned topics, informed Mr. Desir about the AJK commitments in advancing the position of journalists in Kosovo and the cooperation of the AJK with local institutions for the protection and safety of journalists.

Dèsir and Begolli Pustina talked about the next meeting between them, at the OSCE conference to be held in Sarajevo this year.

The President of the AJK, Begolli Pustina thanked Mr. Harlem Dèsir and Ambassador Jan Braathu for the support that the OSCE has provided to the AJK in all of its initiatives for the protection, security and further advancement of the position of journalists in our country.

The meeting was also attended by representatives of Serbian journalists in Kosovo.

BELGRADE, 28.02.2019. – The Independent Union of Journalists in Serbia (NUNS) protested over a suspended sentence handed by the Higher Court in Belgrade to a man who had sent death threats to a journalist and her daughter, the Beta news agency reported on Thursday.

Branko Tomic, 36, from the eastern Majdanpek town, walked free form the courtroom after tweeted severe death threats to Tatjana Vojtehovska, a TV journalist, and her daughter, receiving an 8-month suspended sentence.

NUNS described the punishment as “uncomprehendingly mild,” accusing Serbia’s judiciary of “practically encouraging verbal violence toward journalists.”

Vojtehovski said she was “shocked” with the verdict, especially with the fact that the judge Ivana Ramic did not take her or her daughter’s statement, as demanded by the prosecutor.

She said she was afraid for her and her family life.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also condemned the sentence.