The parliamentary committee has decided to repeat the procedure for proposing candidates for the ninth member of the REM Council.

As stated, the public call will be published in the Official Gazette, the daily newspaper Politika, and on the website of the National Assembly of Serbia.

Let us remind you that yesterday the members of the National Assembly of Serbia voted on an incomplete composition of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM), selecting eight out of nine members from 18 candidates for this body. 

The members chosen for the REM Council include Stevica Smederevac, Milan Petković, and Miloš Garić, who will serve a two-year term; Mileva Malešivć and Rodoljub Šabić, who were elected for four years; and Ira Prodanov Krajišnik, Dubravka Valić Nedeljković, and Snežana Miljković, who will each serve a six-year term.

In the category of national councils for national minorities, neither of the two candidates received a majority of votes, which is why the ninth member of the REM Council was not elected. 

This followed a dispute during the alignment of candidates proposed by the councils of national minorities. According to official assembly documentation and the call for alignment sent to the councils, the authorized proposers in this category were considered to be the national councils of the Hungarian, Albanian, and Bosniak minorities.

However, representatives of nine other councils, members of the informal Coordination Body of National Minority Councils, also participated in the vote and elected the Hungarian and Bosniak candidates.

The civil sector demanded adherence to the law, as did 12 candidates for the REM Council in an open letter, while the Ćuruvija Foundation, NUNS, NDNV, and CRTA filed a criminal complaint against the secretary of the assembly committee, Dana Gak, due to suspicion that she influenced the outcome of the alignment of national councils.

The Committee for Culture and Information also ultimately adopted a proposal to return the process within the legal framework and to ensure that the candidates in this category are Ameri and Fijuljanin, meaning that Bodžoni would be excluded.

However, the Vice President of the National Assembly and MP of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, Elvira Kovač, who stated that the Assembly could vote on the new REM Council as early as Friday, requested that no candidates be elected in the category of national councils.

According to her, the Committee for Culture and Information made the decision to exclude the candidate from the National Council of the Hungarian National Minority, Ištvan Bodžoni, under pressure from the OSCE, which, she said, was proposed by 15 national councils. 

Šabić: Election Sabotaged

Lawyer Rodoljub Šabić thanked on platform X for the congratulations on his election to the REM Council.

“Thank you very much to all who congratulated me on my election to the REM Council! Even if it is premature. I am pleased that the vote for the REM Council between independents and candidates of the government was 4:4. This is definitely the best result for independent organizations and the opposition in unequal matches against an autocratic regime in the last 13 years… Unfortunately, through an agreement, and indeed a sad, transparent, literally criminal combination of Ana Brnabić and SVM, the election in the category of national minority councils was sabotaged; otherwise, the result would have been even better,” he stated.

He added that today “at the meeting of proposers, candidates, and elected members of the REM Council, they will agree on a definitive joint stance and reaction to both the result and the theft.”

Valić Nedeljković: A Mistake That Should Not Have Happened

The newly elected member of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM), Professor Dubravka Valić Nedeljković, assessed last night that the incomplete election of the Council “represents a mistake that should not have happened.”

Valić Nedeljković told Insajder that “of course this should not have happened,” as reported on the television’s website.

“After long negotiations and insistence from part of the non-governmental sector, the committee of the assembly determined who the qualified proposers were and who the candidates meeting the legal requirements were,” she noted.

She reminded that 18 candidates entered the assembly procedure, and it was expected that REM would “finally be complete.”

Source: ANEM