State Department warns of religious discrimination in Serbia

Under Serbian law, seven religious groups are defined as traditional – the Serbian Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church, Slovak Evangelical Church, Reformed Christian Church, Evangelical Christian Church, Islamic community, and Jewish community. There are 20 registered non-traditional religious groups in the country.

“Serbian media have reported public discrimination against Protestant groups at the time of the October celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and there have continued to appear articles critical of non-traditional religious groups in the press and on web portals, describing some religious groups as “sects.” Anti-Semitic literature was available in some book stores, and the Jewish community reported incidents of anti-Semitic comments in online media”, the report said.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses reported two incidents of physical assault and two instances of vandalism against their property adding that attacks against them are rarely prosecuted as religiously motivated crimes which some observers feel I done intentionally by prosecutors intentionally to minimize the appearance of religious intolerance,” the report said.

The government did not keep records of religiously motivated violence, and reporting from individual religious organizations was sparse, the report added.

The report said that minority religious groups feel that the law governing traditional and non-traditional religious groups is biased and that the laws governing churches and religious communities were in conflict with constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and equal status among religious groups.

The government continued restitution of religious properties confiscated in 1945 or later but both Islamic communities reported difficulties in their claims for communist-era property restitution because both had filed claims for the same properties, the report said.