SERBIA: Amendments to the Criminal Code & more – 30th Sep 2025

Dobar dan from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Serbia Update from the 30th of September twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Serbia.

Several parallel rallies of student protesters and government supporters took place on Sunday the 28th all over Serbia. While the pro-government protesters marched against the student protests, the students rallied with the same goal as in the past ten months: justice.

Due to the rallies taking place at the same time, violent incidents broke out in some of the cities. In the central city of Cacak, masked men from the pro-government crowd attacked student protesters with baseball bats, leaving several injured. In the western town of Bogatic, students reported that they were thrown rocks and bottles at, and even reported gunfire. In Belgrade and the northern city of Novi Sad, cordons of police were protecting the pro-government rally and attacking the protesting students.

Recall that students started protesting in late November of twenty twenty-four after the collapse of a railway station canopy killed sixteen people. Ever since, students and those who support them have kept demanding accountability from the state.

Speaking of rallies, some ruling politicians have been mulling over proposing the Draft Law on Amendments to the Criminal Code for some time now. The law would significantly impact civil rights in several ways. One of the key changes includes prohibiting traffic blockades of any sort, with a one-year jail sentence for those who break this law. Another major change would be the elimination of Article 136 which punishes police officers who use force to get confessions from detainees.

Political analysts commended some parts of the law, like the introduction of revenge pornography criminalization with penalties of up to ten years in prison. However, they labeled the draft law as mostly problematic because they say it targets student protesters as well as encourages police brutality by abolishing laws that punish such behavior.

Several farmers’ associations have announced that they will be protesting again because the government hasn’t addressed their demands. They did not specify the dates for the upcoming demonstrations, but said that they will last for multiple days. Recall that two weeks ago, farmers in Serbia held warning protests in multiple cities, calling on the government to fulfill their demands, or else they would intensify their demonstrations. However, state officials brushed them off, branding their demands as impossible to meet.

Farmers are mainly demanding that the government pay off overdue subsidies and incentives promised to them and to provide excise-free fuel at gas stations.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the European People’s Party, or EPP, held a meeting on Thursday the 25th to discuss the associate membership of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party or SNS. The EPP, the leading conservative-leaning party in the EU, initiated an internal scrutiny process regarding the role of the SNS within the EPP. The process serves as a review of the SNS and their actions in Serbia, since the EPP has acknowledged and condemned the crackdown on student protests led by Serbian officials.

The ruling SNS party has played a major role in oppressing protesters in Serbia who are loud about corruption and injustice. From monitoring what the media broadcasts to bending the law in order to punish protesters, the SNS and its leader, President Vucic, show no intention of slowing down.

On Friday the 26th, authorities arrested two Serbian citizens on suspicion that they had been training Romanian and Moldovan citizens to sabotage the parliamentary elections in Moldova. They are suspected of having organized several combat-tactical training sessions for more than 150 Moldovans and Romanians from July to September in the western town of Loznica.

Serbian authorities suspected that the two arrested men could have received help from Russian and Belarusian instructors who travelled to Serbia in thirty-day rotations. They added that the Romanian and Moldovan participants of the sessions entered Serbia under the guise of religious pilgrimages, and that they were paid to attend the training.

In other news, GREVIO, the Council of Europe’s expert group on the prevention of violence against women, published a report on Thursday the 25th, highlighting that Serbia has seen little to no progress in the past five years when it comes to law amendments that would protect women.

They said that there is a widespread online abuse of women, mainly in the form of revenge pornography, as well as the lack of a trustworthy justice system women can turn to, since the perpetrators often go unpunished.

The report noted that there were eleven femicides in Serbia so far in twenty twenty-five - a number they said was unacceptably high.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or the EBRD, published on Thursday the 25th its revised forecast for Serbia's increase in the money supply this year. In their report, they wrote that they expect Serbia’s GDP to grow by two percent at the end of twenty twenty-five, which is one percent lower than what they had projected in May. The EBRD noted that Serbia's money supply increased by around two percent in the first half of twenty twenty-five.

They explained that the unrest in the country brought down trade, hospitality and related industries, decreasing investments and exports, while annual inflation remained the same.

Still in the economy, the recent introduction of retail profit margins continues to make rounds within the economics community, as they analyze how they are affecting the market and consumers. Economist Dragan Milicevic wrote for the news outlet Radar that the government’s promise of retail margins lowering food prices up to twenty percent was mostly false, as prices dropped only slightly, and in some cases even increased. Milicevic underlined that prices of flour, milk and deli meat went up by around fifteen percent.

He emphasized that retail chains started prioritizing their own private-label products since they do not bear additional expenses and are already more affordable, but still not as cheap as the government had promoted.

On another note, for the past few months, we have been reporting on Serbia’s recurring requests for the US to postpone sanctions on the Serbian state-owned energy company NIS. The US responded to the latest request and postponed the planned sanctions by just four days, announcing that the sanctions would take effect on the 1st of October. NIS officials said in a press release that the company is struggling to fulfill the US’s demands of acquiring a majority stake from Russia, while maintaining social stability for employees and providing citizens with energy.

Recall that in January, the US announced its plan to sanction NIS for its majorly Russian ownership. President Vucic said that Serbia was just collateral damage in the not-so-friendly relationship between the US and Russia, due to Serbia’s neutral stance between the East and West. He said that there is little hope for another sanctions postponement.

As the sanctions on NIS loom, Ana Brnabic, the Parliament Speaker, announced last week that Serbia completed the negotiations with Azerbaijan on the construction of a natural gas power plant in the south of Serbia. The planned power plant is a project between Serbia and Azerbaijan aiming to diversify Serbia’s energy supply and reduce its dependency on Russian gas. The investment into the power plant’s construction is estimated at around seventy billion dinars, which is around 700 million dollars.

Closing this edition with some cultural news, Belgrade’s MTS Hall will host the renowned sympho-rock Prime Orchestra on the 9th of October in a show titled Rock Sympho Show. As part of their European tour, Prime Orchestra will perform well-known rock jams by artists such as Led Zeppelin, Queen, Nirvana, and Metallica. Tickets are available for purchase online and at Ticket Vision outlets, costing between 3,500 dinars, which is around thirty-five dollars, and 7,500 dinars, around seventy-five dollars.

For more information about the Rock Sympho Show, check out the link in the show notes!

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Do daljnjeg, zbogom!