In his letters sent to the heads of the Journalists' Association of Serbia (UNS), the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia (NUNS) and the Independent Journalists' Association of Vojvodina (NDNV), Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection Rodoljub Sabic congratulated 3 May, the World Press Freedom Day, to all journalists in Serbia.
Expressing his best wishes for continued success in the work of journalists and the media and reaffirming his readiness and duty to help them carry out their important social function, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:
"The role of the media and journalists is necessary and irreplaceable in every actual democratic society and it put an obligation on states and governments to constantly ensure and improve conditions for the exercise of that role. In that context, at this moment, it is very important that the progress Serbia made in the regulatory sphere by the adoption of the package of new media laws be valorized in the real life as soon as possible.
It is necessary for the state and the society to find answers to numerous open questions as soon as possible, among which the following particularly stand out:
- Non-transparency of the media ownership,
- Non-transparency of financing and impact on the media by using budget funds, tax reliefs etc.
- Non-defined status of the public broadcasting service,
- Self-censorship and the phenomena of the "war" in the electronic sphere, i.e. frequent and continual attacks on certain websites, emergence of the so-called bots etc.
- Increasing tabloidization of the media, coupled with the increasingly frequent leaks of "confidential information" to certain media outlets, in situations where such information is unavailable to other media outlets.
The role of the government in finding answers to these questions is significant, but journalists and the media should also give their contribution. They must, primarily through actions of their professional associations, reduce the huge gap between the valuable ethnical and professional standards they included in their code and the behavior of certain journalists in practice, who demonstrate a complete disregard for those standards.
In conclusion, I would like to recall that the undisputable duty of the state is to ensure personal safety for journalists, which undoubtedly includes the duty to punish those who jeopardize journalists' safety. In that context, it is commendable that after so much time criminal charges have been brought for the murder of Mr. Slavko Curuvija, however, it is not commendable that this has not been done in the cases of Ms Dada Vujasinovic and Mr. Milan Pantic. It is of utmost importance that these cases are also solved and closed, to guarantee that nothing similar can and will not ever happen again in Serbia."
