Committee on Information discusses censorship claims

Committee on Information discusses censorship claims

Tasovac told a meeting of the Serbian Parliament’s Culture and Information Committee that prior to the publication of its statement, "the OSCE Mission had not addressed any institution of state, and he himself did not know anything about websites being taken down," Tanjug reported.

He said he believed that the closure of sites could have been caused by technical reasons and such cases could not have anything to do with any state-level decisions.

Tasovac expressed confidence that the upcoming approval of three media bills would help better regulate that area.

The minister said that final consultations on the bills were underway and they should start being discussed in the parliament at the end of July.

The censorship issue discussion has been launched by Vesna Marjanović, committee chairperson and member of the opposition Democratic Party (DS), who, stressing that she spoke on her own behalf, said that media freedoms were endangered in Serbia and the country did not need any “hassles with international institutions.”

She expressed great concern over the taking down of websites and urged lawmakers to act as it “causes worries about possible limiting of freedoms of expression on the internet.”

Aleksandra Jerkov (DS) said that attempts were being made in the past several months to stifle "any kind of critical opinion and prevent any disagreement with what the current government is doing."

"Independent journalist associations have warned about censorship on the internet, independent portals are shut down. The site of Peščanik was brought down yesterday after a text was published about the doctoral dissertation of Interior Minister Nebojša Stefanović," she said, and asked Tasovac "why his ministry was not reacting to that."

Jerkov said a letter PM Aleksandar Vučić sent to the OSCE asking for an apology was "a very bad manner of communucation with an international istitution."

But MP Vladimir Đukanović (SNS) said that "stories about the state being behind the bringing down of websties made no sense," adding that "websites such as Teleprompter have no traffic" and therefore he saw no reason for anyone to bring them down.

He added that "in any country someone who writes on a social network that corpses are being transported would be detained because this is not about the media freedom, but about a criminal act."

"Nobody addressed (us) when Mr. (Radomir) Počuča was detained?," Đukanović asked opposition MPs, adding that what was published on social networks during the floods was "five times worse than what Počuča presented."

Počuča was a police unit spokesman who on his Facebook urged football hooligans to attack the Women in Black NGO.