“We have been insisting, from the very beginning, on the fact that this is a serious deviation from the Media Strategy, and not only this strategy, but we are now basically annulling the entire process, launched in 2011, and subsequently actually legalizing Telekom’s conduct, which has, under the law in effect, been illegal all these years.
Up to now, under the law in force, Telekom was not allowed to own any media, yet it does. This law is an attempt to legalize this situation that we believe to be completely unacceptable,” said Stevanovic.
The Serbian Parliament fall sitting opened Monday to the sounds of the Serbian national anthem. There are 60 items on the sitting agenda, including the disputed media laws, the 2024 budget and the lex specialis for the Specialized EXPO 2027.
The media laws have attracted the most public attention because, without the knowledge of the Working Group, the draft laws were amended to include paragraphs subordinating cable operators to the Regulatory body for electronic media (REM) and allowing state ownership of the media.
Following a reaction from journalists’ associations and OSCE, articles on the cable operators were dropped, but the one on the state’s media ownership was kept.
