“Deepen” Collaboration between Prosecutions and Media

This is one of the conclusions of a meeting held in Doboj on September 27 at which representatives of judicial institutions of Zenica-Doboj Canton and the media reporting on court processes participated.

As indicated by representatives of the media, the fact that the Doboj District Prosecution works until 3 p.m., as well as the fact that the person acting as an information officer is, at the same time, the secretary to that investigative institution, represents a problem.

“I do not have an official phone and I cannot answer phone calls after the end of the working day at 3 p.m.,” said Slobodanka Lukic, Secretary and Information Officer with the District Prosecution in Doboj.

Prosecutors, who are in charge of investigations, often answer phone calls from journalists, who have their private telephone numbers, in order to help them. Representatives of the Association of Court Reporters, AIS, consider that favoritism and putting journalists in an unequal position.

The Spokesperson of the Public Safety Station in Doboj says that she often receives phone calls from journalists, who ask her questions that should be posed to the Prosecution in Doboj. Despite her will to help journalists, the Spokesperson of the Public Safety Station in Doboj says that it is not right for her to do the job for an institution, whose employee she is not.

The District Prosecution in Doboj says that they requested that a spokesperson be recruited, but the request was not approved. Also, they pointed out that the communication with the public had been improved over the past few years.

Journalists reporting from Doboj said that they had an extremely good cooperation with police, adding that it sometimes happened that they could not obtain information from the Prosecution in the afternoon hours although the specific piece of information was topical on that day only.

This meeting was one in a series of meetings organized by the Association of Court Reporters in collaboration with the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, with the aim of improving collaboration between the media and judicial institutions and achieving transparency of judicial institutions and responsibility by the media.