Withdrawal of the lawsuit by Predrag Koluvija against BIRN Serbia.
The decision of the Appellate Court in Belgrade has deemed the lawsuit of Predrag Koluvija against BIRN Serbia as withdrawn, as Koluvija and his lawyer did not appear at the hearings.
Koluvija has been ordered to pay BIRN Serbia and the editor-in-chief Milorad Ivanović nearly 113,000 dinars for procedural costs.
Previously, in May of this year, the Higher Court in Belgrade issued a first-instance decision deeming Koluvija's lawsuit withdrawn for the same reason. Koluvija appealed this decision, but the Appeal Court has now dismissed his appeal as unfounded and upheld the ruling of the Higher Court.
Koluvija filed a lawsuit against BIRN before the Higher Court in Belgrade at the beginning of 2023. In the lawsuit, he claimed that false information was presented in the title of the courtroom report “Continued Trial: Koluvija and Before Jovanjica Was in the Marijuana Business,” as well as in the text itself, regarding his prior involvement in marijuana cultivation.
He sought 200,000 dinars from BIRN for what he described in the lawsuit as "emotional distress."
BIRN provided a detailed report on everything that was heard during the proceedings in the Jovanjica case in September 2022, during which the prosecutor presented information from the Hungarian court rulings on cannabis smuggling from 2011 and 2012 that mentioned Koluvija, along with responses from Koluvija's defense and Koluvija himself regarding those claims.
There are two legal proceedings against Predrag Koluvija before the Special Court in Belgrade, both alleging that he was the organizer of a criminal group that cultivated marijuana for sale. He was arrested after being stopped by the police on the Belgrade-Niš highway in November 2019 for reckless driving and was subsequently detained for possessing a fake police ID. On the same day, the police raided his marijuana nursery near Stara Pazova, where, according to the indictment, 1.6 tons of marijuana were found. BIRN Serbia has been monitoring the legal proceedings and reporting on the hearings since the beginning of the court process. |
BIRN Classified Koluvija's Lawsuit as a SLAPP Suit
The Law on Public Information and Media explicitly states that information from ongoing criminal proceedings can be published if presented during the main hearing.
“In this specific case, we have all the elements of a SLAPP lawsuit […] Simply put, these are lawsuits that do not aim to protect rights but rather to intimidate the media into not reporting on certain topics or individuals, thereby stifling public debate on issues of general or public interest,” BIRN stated in its response to the lawsuit.
Strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPP lawsuits, are “a form of legal harassment of critical voices perpetrated by powerful individuals and organizations seeking to avoid public scrutiny,” according to a report on SLAPP lawsuits in Serbia published by ARTICLE 19, the American Bar Association's Center for Human Rights, and the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS) in February 2022.
The aim of these lawsuits is to intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust journalists and activists to silence them. The report notes that the number of such lawsuits against journalists and media in Serbia has been increasing since 2018.
Source: BIRN Serbia
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