Human Rights Action (HRA) requested from the Minister of Culture, Mr. Mićunović, to request that the Report on Investigations and Violence against Journalists, made by the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office and Supreme Court in accordance with the Action Plan for Monitoring Implementation of Recommendations Given in European Commission’s Opinion be supplemented to include all cases of attack on journalists and others endangered for using freedom of speech (the original letter to the Minister is available here ).

The report is incomplete since it does not contain information on investigation of the attacks on journalists Tufik Softić and Mladen Stojović, progress in murder investigations of Duško Jovanović (editor-in-chief of Dan) and Srđan Vojičić i.e. the attack at writer Jevrem Brković, nor explanation why serious death threats to Aleksandar Zeković have never been processed and who is responsible for that. We reiterate that the report should have included information on all those cases, including the attacks on Brković and threats to Zeković, since both of those men, although not journalists, were endangered for exercising freedom of speech. According to the practice of the European Court of Human Rights and other international standards, NGO activists and other citizens enjoy the protection of freedom of speech in the same way as journalists when they investigate and talk about issues of public interest.

Given the results of the opinion poll by Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (CEDEM), according to which the highest number of journalists (89.8%) believes that for promotion of media freedom in Montenegro it would be important to: (1) amend the Criminal Code in order to treat attack on a journalist as an attack on a state official in discharge of his/her official duties and (2) effectively process attacks and threats to journalists, we remind that HRA proposed adoption of two new criminal offences in November 2010: Preventing Journalists from Performing Their Professional Duties and Assaulting a Journalist Performing His/ Her Professional Duties, based on criminal acts that protect officials in the performance of official duties. Unfortunately, the Government did not accept our proposals during the adoption of the Criminal Code amendments in June 2011. The next opportunity for the introduction of these new offenses would most likely be the adoption of the new Criminal Code, which according to the information from the Ministry of Justice, should happen by 2014.