Future Steps for Complete Information
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During a meeting held in Sarajevo on Thursday, May 31 AIS journalists said that their work had become “complicated” recently and that they were facing huge problems when reporting from trials, because the State Prosecution no longer provided the public with indictments and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted a rulebook, limiting access to information.
The journalists explained that the State Court’s “Rulebook on access to information under the control of the Court and cooperation with the community” and “Instructions on anonymization of court decisions, audio/video recordings from trials and other informational material” issued in March this year significantly limited the possibilities of providing the public with correct information.
As stipulated in the Rulebook of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the media could only obtain ten-minute audio or video recordings from trials.
At the same time the Instruction for Anonymization says that initials should be used instead of full first and last names in court documents and that names of institutions, companies, agencies and municipalities should be protected as well.
AIS members agreed, at this meeting, that they would continue implementing their advocacy campaign against these decisions and that they would continue preparing articles and analysis about the problems they faced when trying to obtain information from state-level judicial bodies.
During this meeting the members were presented with an initiative of the Association of Journalists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Transparency International and Balkans Investigative Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina to file an appeal with the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina concerning the mentioned State Court’s decisions.
In addition to this initiative, the AIS members agreed that they would try to present the problems facing court reporters to the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the upcoming period, so the delegates could publicly express their opinion about the eventual revision of the Law on Personal Data of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Representatives of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation expressed interest in supporting the AIS initiative.
Besides that, the meeting participants agreed to consider the possibility of launching a public campaign against the decisions, limiting the public access to documents, rendered by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its Prosecution.
The potential activities would include signing of a petition, launching of a Facebook page for people to submit comments and inviting NGOs to join the coalition, advocating for changes of these decisions.
During this meeting the AIS members agreed to hold four new meetings of local media and judicial institutions in local communities with the aim of improving the collaboration between them.
It was agreed that AIS members would visit Odzak in September this year and Trebinje in October.
A visit to Brcko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina will take place in November, while a joint meeting of the media and judicial bodies from Eastern Sarajevo and Sarajevo will be convened in the first week of December.
