29. 05. 2014

PANIC OR FREEDOM: WHERE ARE THE LIMITS?

29. 05. 2014 (B92) - Milan Antonijević from YUKOM said for B92 that one can hardly talk about spreading of panic when examining events that took place on the Internet during the floods.

The Belgrade police arrested three people for publishing false information through social networks about the number of casualties in the floods.

The Belgrade police chief Veselin Milić said the suspects were charged with attempted criminal offence of "spreading panic and disorder".

They said that in Obrenovac hundreds of residents were killed which, as he said, is not true. Milić, however, did not specify who those persons are. B92 was unable to obtain further details from the prosecutor's office which ordered the arrests.

Milan Antonijević from the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM) said for Radio B92 that one should be very careful when drawing the line between freedom of speech and spreading of panic.

He recalls the position of the European Court of Human Rights that freedom of speech is set very broadly and that any delay in information flow can cause citizens to question whether the information is being manipulated or not.

"When you examine what has been happening on the internet, it is very difficult to define it as a criminal offence of causing panic and disorder. To do so there must be intent, there must be an awareness that the conveyed information was false, and then it must be determined that there is panic, or the breach of public peace and order, or the obstruction of decisions taken by the authorities operating during this disaster in Serbia," says Antonijević.

"Therefore, the Prosecutor's Office has to be very careful when dealing with these concepts and it should not decide to take measures in each case, and should examine all the circumstances. At the same time, you have the freedom of expression, which is set very broadly, by the standards of the European Court of Human Right where it is said that this freedom is very broad, that citizens have the right and interest to be informed about everything, and that in the absence of information you will have half-truths and dissemination of certain news items that will later turn out to be false," he said.