December 17, 2024
The Serbian Ministry of Information has in recent days been hastily finalising the activities of the working groups responsible for amending the country’s three most important media laws, in a rush to fulfil everything the state has committed to implementing under the Reform Agenda in order to be able to access funding from the EU’s pre-accession funds.
With its Reform Agenda, the Serbian Government obliged itself to pass a new Law on Public Media Services by year’s end, harmonised with the EU acquis and Council of Europe standards, and to amend the existing Law on Electronic Media and Law on Public Information.
The Government of Serbia once again rendered the media law amendment process meaningless when two months of intensive work carried out by the Working Group for Amendments to the Law on Public Media Services was followed by Minister Dejan Ristić imposing a draft law that extends beyond the framework of the working group and contains serious omissions that contradict Serbia’s Media Strategy, announced the Coalition for Media Freedom.
The Ministry didn’t previously include some of the largest journalists’ associations in the working groups for amendments to media laws, choosing instead to include organisations that are under the control of the regime. One of the two largest associations of journalists in the country – the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia – was only included in the working group following a protest.
