SERBIA: Media Outlet Under Fire & more – 1st April 2025

Dobar dan from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Serbia Update from the 1st of April twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Serbia.

On Saturday the 29th, thousands of people gathered in front of the pro-government Informer media outlet headquarters in Belgrade for a protest, calling for the channel’s ban due to violations of the journalistic code. The students who organized the protest called Informer out for spreading misinformation and doxxing the students who were peacefully attending the protests over the Novi Sad canopy collapse tragedy on national television.

Informer recently featured a news segment, where the outlet’s editor-in-chief revealed the names, faces and phone numbers of some of the students. The outlet also spread fake news about the private lives of activists and students.

The protest lasted for six hours, and it aimed to highlight the lack of reaction from the competent bodies over Informer’s breaches of the journalistic code.

2) Still on the students’ protests - Guillaume Mercier, the European Commission spokesperson, said on Tuesday the 25th that the EU is closely following the situation in Serbia with large demonstrations taking place almost daily. However, Mercier said that their current priority with Serbia is to support it on its path to EU accession. He said that the EU does not have any plans to engage with the protesting students in the country, and advised them to hold a dialogue with the government.

Students, and those who are in support of their protests, are critical of the EU’s neutral stance. They are demanding that the EU defend its vocally stated ideals, such as the rule of law, by condemning numerous cases of its violations by the government since the protests began.

In an update to a story from a previous show, last week, we mentioned that the government formally acknowledged the resignation of Prime Minister Vucevic. Now, president Vucic has to form a new government. In a press release from Wednesday the 26th, Vucic invited parliamentary parties to consult on a new prime minister. However, seven opposition parties said that they refused Vucic’s invitation. In a press release, they said that a transitional government should be formed, which would create the conditions for free elections. They added that Vucic has lost his political legitimacy and support of his former followers.

Recall that Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party has been called out for rigging elections in the past, with independent election observers reporting tons of irregularities at the last couple of voting periods, such as ballot box stuffing and bribery.

Since we mentioned Guillaume Mercier, he also spoke about the current state of relations between Serbia and Kosovo. On Thursday the 27th, Mercier said that the EU has set aside around six and a half million dollars for their Reform and Growth Facility for the Western Balkans, which includes Serbia and Kosovo. With these funds, the EU plans to help candidate countries with their EU alignment.

With some countries already receiving funds from the EU’s program, Mercier said that the EU will further assess whether Kosovo and Serbia will receive any at all, noting that it depends on the progress in their dialogue to improve their relations.

Recall that Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence, which is causing tensions between the two.

Going back to the media for a bit. On Wednesday the 26th, the independent media outlet N1 reported that, for the first time, their European correspondent had not been invited to a press conference which president Vucic held the day before. N1 is one of the few Serbian media outlets that is not pro-regime and has a TV channel frequency.

The outlet criticized Vucic for excluding their press from the conference, whilst inviting all of the pro-regime outlets. They said that this was an alarming precedent and an act of silencing independent journalists. They then called international journalist organizations to condemn Vucic’s discriminatory actions.

Speaking of the government targeting journalists, a new Amnesty International investigation published on Thursday the 27th revealed that two journalists from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network were targets of the Pegasus spyware. Amnesty International’s Security Lab said that the two journalists kept receiving messages from an unknown Serbian number, which they later confirmed were infectious links that led to the discreet installation of the Pegasus spyware.

Amnesty International said that the Israeli NSO Group, Pegasus’s creator, told them that they only sell their systems to vetted government end-users, prompting the investigators to believe that high government officials are behind the attacks.

On that note about high government officials, Darko Glisic, the Public Investment Minister, called for the arrest of Vladan Djokic, the rector of the University of Belgrade, for supporting the university blockades. On Friday the 28th, Glisic said that the rector was allowing the lectures to stop by supporting the blockades. He added that this was wasting the students’ funds they used to pay for the school year, accusing the rector of corruption.

On the other hand, rector Djokic noted that the only thing preventing the school year from continuing is the government's not fulfilling the students’ demands. These include the release of the entire documentation regarding the Novi Sad railway station renovation, the arrest of those who assaulted students, the release of peaceful protesters from prison, and an increase in the budget of higher education of twenty percent.

Since we mentioned the railway station renovation, the Commission of Inquiry, which is currently looking into the renovation case, said that the authorities need to interrogate the president and two other high government officials over questionable decisions that could have led to its failure. On Wednesday the 26th the Commission said that president Vucic, and former cabinet members Zorana Mihajlovic and Mladjan Dinkic, have made decisions that compromised the quality and durability of the railway station building.

The Commission argued that the three officials aimed to lower the cost of the renovation project, which took place in July last year, paying the construction company a fourth of the EU’s budget for the renovation. The Commission suspects that the government could have pocketed the money, or otherwise used it illegally.

In some energy news, the state-owned petrol company NIS announced on Saturday the 29th that the US has postponed its planned sanctions for another thirty days. Last week, we said that NIS asked the US Department of the Treasury to remove them from its list of companies it intends to sanction. However, due to the long waiting times to be removed from the list, it also asked them to postpone the sanctions until their eventual cancellation.

The US planned to sanction NIS back in February due to its largely Russian ownership, but had postponed the sanctions implementation for March. With the new postponement, the oil company has until the 28th of April to make changes in its ownership so that the US would cancel the sanctions.

More on energy, Serbia’s Nuclear Facilities said on Tuesday the 25th that they signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese Institute of Atomic Energy. They said that they plan to cooperate on radioactive waste management and protection against radiation, with their first project being the decommissioning of a research heavy-water nuclear reactor in the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences near Belgrade.

And to wrap up this edition, Belgrade's philharmonic is holding a concert on Friday the 4th of April called Sublime music, with Daniel Raiskin as the conductor, at the main hall of the Kolarac endowment. The event will feature classical music from different eras, with the main composition being the famous Scheherazade. Tickets range from 1,800 dinars, which is around fifteen dollars, to 3,000 dinars, around thirty dollars, and are available online.

For more information, 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!