Protection of Indictees’ Rights or Public Interest
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The meeting held on Thursday, May 16 was attended by representatives of the Cantonal Court and Prosecution from Travnik, Ministry of Internal Affairs, MUP, of the Central Bosnia Canton, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE, and about ten journalists. They expressed satisfaction with the progress achieved in collaboration with judicial bodies over the past period, pointing out that additional efforts were needed to further improve the collaboration.
Journalists from the Central Bosnia Canton said that they were particularly satisfied with their co-operation with the Travnik Cantonal Prosecution, adding that the spokesperson of that institution was available to the media and willing to respond to their questions.
On the other hand, the journalists revealed that the MUP and Cantonal Court did not have spokespersons, which slows down their mutual collaboration in certain situations.
Also, it was pointed out that judicial institutions very rarely or never publish announcements or organise press conferences and that trial schedules for weeks ahead, which were published by the Cantonal Court, only contained case numbers, but not names of indictees. As they said, this made it more difficult for journalists to follow the trials.
The anonymisation of court decisions was discussed as a special problem in the collaboration with judicial bodies. Representatives of the Cantonal Court said that the anonymisation of documents issued by the Court and Prosecution was the correct thing to do in order to protect personal data of indictees, adding that human rights of those persons would have otherwise been violated.
On the other hand, the journalists said that the anonymisation deprived the general public of its right to get an insight into the work of judicial bodies, while violating the human rights of journalists at the same time.
AIS representatives further said that the anonymisation of court verdicts represented violation of the Law on Criminal Proceedings, which stipulates that trials should be public, except in extraordinary circumstances, and disabled judicial bodies from serving as a correctional agent in the society by reducing the risk of repetition of crimes by publicly announcing its verdicts.
Journalists from the Central Bosnia Canton said that, despite the anonymisation practice, they managed to obtain personal data of suspects and indictees through informal sources, but they expressed a need for strengthening the official channels for obtaining information.
Considering the fact that representatives of judicial institutions said that poor education of journalists about the work of courts and prosecutions represented a problem in their mutual collaboration, an AIS representative gave a short lecture on the basis of professional court reporting to the journalists who attended the meeting.
The next AIS meeting will be held in Eastern Sarajevo.
