09. 03. 2005

WILL JOURNALISTS GO TO PRISON?

BELGRADE, March 9, 2005 – Draft Criminal Code envisages criminal charges for libel and defamation, with imprisonment of the charged journalists. The possibility to charge a journalist with prison sentence from six months to three years – if the court found that the journalist has declared or reported libel or insult – has provoked fierce reaction of the media. The Independent Journalist Association of Serbia (IJAS) proposed the elimination of libel and defamation from the Criminal Code. The Association suggested that these provisions should be regarded as individual problem. Although the journalists were explicit in their demands, the group working on the Bill on Criminal Code regarded them as overstated. The lawyer Slobodan Soskic anticipated that this would only lead to “irresponsible journalism”, but believed that the compromise could still be found. “We are under great pressure of, so to say, amateur public, and here I have in mind the media as well, which I believe is not rational enough, to annul the prison sentence and to have the fines, but to leave the libel and defamation in the Criminal Code as a punishable criminal act”, said Soskic. However, Editor-in-chief of TV Politika Vladan Alimpijevic noted that the consequences of this mollified Code could be very high fines which the journalists, who earn 200 euros on average, could hardly be able to pay. The initiative of IJAS to eliminate libel and defamation from the Serbian Criminal Code was backed by the International Journalist Federation and OSCE.