Closing the Ministerial Circle: An Author's Piece by Saša Mirković for Vreme

European Integration of Serbia largely depends on the minister in the Serbian government who, in 2009, ignited the flag of the European Union in front of TV cameras. This is known by Antonio Costa, Kaja Kallas, and Marta Kos, who kept their distance from Boris Bratina during their recent visits to Belgrade. Aleksandar Vučić is also aware of this, as his appointment sent a clear message to Brussels following a working dinner with the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Council.

Perhaps that is why so much confusion accompanies the rushed process of meeting the conditions for opening the Third cluster and obtaining a substantial amount of money from the Growth Plan fund, which are contingent on the amendments to three media laws, the selection of the REM Council, and the fulfillment of ODIHR recommendations. While students made the issue of selecting the REM Council widely known through their two-week protest in front of RTS, the same cannot be said for the content of the recommendations for improving electoral conditions, let alone for the amendments to the three media laws.

THE ROAD TO HELL

Dry interpretations of the proposed amendments surely would not attract the attention of the broader public if hidden agendas aimed at lowering the achieved standards of freedom of expression were not cloaked in seductive formulations. This explains why the process has lasted almost twenty months and why it has taken three ministers of information and telecommunications (Mihailo Jovanović, Dejan Ristić, and Boris Bratina) to move things off dead center.

The experience of the state secretary from the time of adopting the set of media laws in 2014, when Serbia reached its highest placement (54th place) on the Global Media Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, teaches me that the path to the current 96th place for our country may have been paved with good intentions. Just like the road to hell. Therefore, with our eyes wide open, we must pay attention to the amendments and supplements to the media laws, which, according to the relevant ministry, are “completely created in accordance with the recommendations of the European Commission and in line with Serbia's Media Strategy.” An insight into the semi-annual correspondence between Brussels and Belgrade would provide answers to numerous dilemmas arising from the proposed legal formulations, many of which are not aligned with the Media Strategy, calling other arguments into question.

(RAZ)EMPOWERING THE PROFESSION

If it were not so, the mandatory public debate that would expose the essence hidden behind some amendments to the Law on Public Information and Media would not be avoided. A drastic example is the provisions concerning the presumption of innocence and the reporting on criminal proceedings, which narrow the space for publishing information that journalists will be allowed to publish about investigations and court proceedings. Instead of fulfilling the European Commission's demands for further strengthening journalists' positions, the opposite is happening – the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications is introducing new safeguards and guarantees for the accused, to the detriment of journalistic reporting. Therefore, I would have liked to see the expression on the face of the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, and her gaze directed at the EU ambassador to Serbia, Emanuel Giofre, at the moment when representatives of the civil sector conveyed this to her during the meeting in Belgrade.

A recent protest in Novi Pazar, motivated by the local authorities' decision to allocate funds to the company “Insajder tim,” publisher of the tabloid “Informer,” through public procurement, could easily spill over into other cities. The reason is the proposed controversial clause in the umbrella media law, which opens the way for unlimited financing of pro-government tabloids without previously defined criteria for selection, definition, and limitations on the type of media service that public authorities can procure. Instead of this area being regulated by the Law on Public Procurement as stipulated by the Media Strategy, this provision will serve authorities to further increase the budgets of pro-government media, which have already been overwhelmingly funded during the tenure of Minister Dejan Ristić and Assistant Minister Dragan Traparić. Evidence of this are the resolutions on the allocation of funds as well as the programmed compositions of committees. As an unwanted witness, the signatory unsuccessfully applied for membership in as many as 29 committees. In contrast to media experts on the job – Branimir Grulović (44 committees) and Branislav Sančanin (23), who, due to controversial scoring engineering, were in 67 of the 87 established committees for co-financing media projects by mid-May! Sources from the ministry say they are in such high demand that they cannot respond, forcing local governments to create new resolutions for committee compositions...

The controversial amendments and supplements to the Law on Public Information and Media should also include a clause that relates to the one that – once again contrary to the Media Strategy and media laws – legalized both indirect and direct state ownership in the media. The long-awaited protective provisions that prescribe the adoption of an ethical code, preventing holders of public functions, party members, and persons in conflict of interest from being governing bodies of publishers, arrive too late and are insufficient. The case of the editorial team of Euronews Serbia, where journalists distanced themselves from the editorial statement regarding the protest in front of the RTS building, tells us that the proposed new clause does not provide sufficient guarantees for the strengthening of freedom of expression and media pluralism here.

MINISTERIAL CIRCLE

No mandatory public debate was held even regarding the amendments to the Law on Electronic Media, which was presented to representatives of journalistic and media associations as part of a package with other draft laws. During the meeting led by the minister’s advisor, Miloš Garić, it was not mentioned that just a few days earlier, the government had adopted the proposal of this law and sent it for parliamentary debate. The fact that the legal text concerning the status of the Regulator is being changed in the midst of the process for selecting members of the REM Council raises suspicion. How do I know? I was a candidate for a member of the REM Council who voluntarily left this irregular process due to illegality. Some lessons are never learned – now the former state secretary Garić is a candidate for a member of the REM Council, even though he does not meet the provisions of Article 15 of the law, a legal act that is currently being changed at the initiative of the ministry where he is still an advisor to the minister.

The public debate was only held in the case of the Law on Public Media Services. Admittedly, during the New Year's and Christmas holidays. As if someone was trying to ensure that as few interested parties as possible were informed about the imposed solutions that were passed by a majority vote at the meeting of the Working Group chaired by Minister Dejan Ristić, whom few remember in that role, except for the parade of ambassadors signaling the beginning of his diplomatic career. Although the authorities took care to promote the future existence of an Ombudsman in public media services, it is a weak consolation for refusing to redefine the funding system, which still leaves Radio-Television Vojvodina on the state budget instead of moving towards systemic independence through an increase in the fee. As a former state secretary and later a candidate for general director of RTS, I know it took a full ten years for the provisions of this law to change. In other words, this opportunity has been missed; the next one is who knows when.

All of the above is well known to the EU delegation and the OSCE mission in Serbia, based on whose intervention we were provided with the texts of the proposed laws that members of the working groups only then saw. So much for the inclusiveness and transparency of the process in which we were asked to subsequently send comments on the amendments. It appears comforting when compared to the Law on Advertising, which is part of the Media Strategy, of which we learned from the media that it was adopted by the government.

If so much time has already been lost, the provisions concerning project co-financing and the transposition of the provisions of the Media Freedom Act should also have been amended in the Law on Public Information and Media. As it stands, everything is somewhat illegal, vague, and non-transparent.

Perhaps that is enough for Nemanja Starović, the Minister for European Integration, to receive the green light from Brussels regarding media laws. Starović is a former author of the quasi-state Center for Social Stability, which produces video pamphlets used to settle scores with dissenters in the media. This is where this ministerial circle of early works comes to a close – from igniting the EU flag to threats against investigative journalists, from whom no one has distanced themselves.

Source: Vreme