New verdict against Serbian journalists

After the verdict of the Basic Court in Belgrade, by which the Serbian journalists were fined for slander of the film director Emir Kusturica with 20,000 RSD (around 170 Euros), the Appellation Court increased the fine in the beginning of March, forcing them to pay 4,000 Euros. The journalists were fined for publishing the article “New Year’s fairytale for murderers” at the independent portal “Pescanik” in January 2011.

“At the trial, which lasted for six years, the Court rejected all of our evidence, propositions, and witnesses, and it was never determined whether the information that we had published was true or false. Nevertheless, it was ruled out that we are guilty”, told Zoran Janic to Insajder.net.

According to his claims, not only that the trial was not just, but the Appellation Court increased the fine 25 times. He said that although the Basic Court ruled out the 20,000 RSD fine to be paid to the famous film director Emir Kusturica, after Kusturica’s appeal, the Appellation Court decided to increase the fine to 4,000 Euros.

“New Year’s fairytale for murders”

The article published in 2011 described the connection between the former members of the Serbian secret service (BIA) from the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s era and the present key state institutions. As a case study, the journalists investigated the liberation of the BIA’s executor Veselin Vukotic.

He was arrested in Barcelona in 2006 and transferred from the Belgian prison to Belgrade in 2009. Despite the fact that Serbia was among many other countries that were claiming Vukotic, he was transferred to Belgrade for a trial, and soon after his extradition to Serbia he was released.

In the disputed article “New Year’s fairytale for murders”, the authors claimed that while Vukotic was hiding from the law in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Emir Kusturica had the occasional role of a courier between Vukotic and the heads of the Secret Service. For publishing this information, Kusturica sued the journalists and the verdict became legally binding in January 2017.

“It is of a particular concern that this verdict was made around the same time when NIN weekly was fined for insulting the police minister Nebojsa Stefanovic”, said Janic.

In the beginning of January, the High Court in Belgrade fined NIN weekly with 300,000 RSD fine (around 2,600 Euros) for slandering the Police Minister Stefanovic.  NIN was fined for a text stating that the night demolition in Hercegovacka street "involved different structures including state and non-state structures” and that such work "was not possible without the awareness or assistance of the police".

The Security Agency’s stamp on the verdict

The authors Janic and Bojcic quoted the documentation of BIA in the article. However, without any explanation, the First Basic Court declined the request of the journalists to obtain those documents through official channels, so that they could prove their claims. This way, Janic claims, the court denied them the right to prove their claims.

The case in front of the court was narrowed down to the access to BIA’s archive files, said Janic.

"The seal of omerta on these archives keep a secret of many crimes from before, during, and after the Yugoslav wars. It creates a crack in the legitimacy of our legal system because the underground archives seem to present prohibited spheres that the arm of the law can never reach. Thus, the claims against journalists such as this one always have to end with some sort of a political verdict,” said Janic.

He argues that during the process, the Court not only rejected all of their evidence, but their witnesses as well.

“We tried to prove the claims we had published, so we gave the Court a copy of the official record of BIA as evidence, which describes the meeting of Kusturica and Vukotic in Perpignan, southern France, in the summer of 2005 during Kusturica’s music band tour. Some names were deleted from that record, so that we could protect our sources”, he said.

Janic also said that Emir Kusturica’s lawyer, Zdenko Tomanovic, addressed the director of the BIA Aleksandar Djordjevic as a citizen with a request to reply whether the content of the official record is authentic.

“Since you have asked for information based on the Freedom of information Act, I inform you you that the heading of the ‘official record’ in this matter is not authentic and that the BIA has no official record from September 2006 containing the content you sent us,” Djordjevic, the Head of the BIA stated in reply.

According to Janic, that kind of reply does not mean that the content of the record he had provided to the Court is inaccurate or nonexistent per se, but might be found under a different heading. It also does not mean that BIA does not posess records on Kusturica-Vuckovic meetings, but the Court accepted Tomanovic’s claim that BIA has no documents on the matter. At the same time, the Court rejected the journalists’ request to officially acquire the original records from the BIA and thus determine whether they published correct or wrong information based on the official records.