KRIK convicted in final ruling for naming persons who sued it

KRIK is now pay the three officers a total of 3,500 euros in damages and legal costs, amounting to about 6,000 euros in overall costs for the entire trial. This is the second final ruling against KRIK this month, reported KRIK.

“We can no longer even publicly complain about the fact we are being sued because we then get sued for that too and lose in court,” said KRIK editor Stevan Dojcinovic.

“The worst part is being found liable for something we never published, for sentences that don’t exist in our article and were invented by the judges, and for our opinion that these are SLAPP lawsuits. This ruling means any investigative media outlet can be convicted regardless of what they publish, as judges will interpret journalistic articles freely and add sentences to them,” he added.

In December 2021, amid a surge of lawsuits against KRIK, it published an article listing the names of those it had been sued by, along with the editor’s opinion that these were SLAPP lawsuits intended to silence journalists.

KRIK said in the article that the lawsuits against it were filed by, among others, the then-head of the Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) Bratislav Gasic, the Serbian president’s best man Nikola Petrovic, the tabloid Kurir, and finally police commander Goran Zivkovic and his two associates, over an article about the problems in their police unit.

KRIK said it was precisely because they were listed in this group that Zivkovic and his colleagues decided to file a new lawsuit against the news desk. The police officers claimed their honor was damaged because Dojcinovic stated they had filed a SLAPP lawsuit (a term used internationally for lawsuits filed by officials and powerful individuals against journalists and activists) and that KRIK labeled them as people of the regime - which is not true as this is not stated anywhere in the article.

KRIK even noted at the beginning of the article that the lawsuits against the news desk “were mostly filed by people in power or businessmen close to them.”

The case was handled by Judge Slobodan Keranovic, who swiftly convicted KRIK’s journalists, but the verdict was overturned by the Court of Appeals. The case was returned to Keranovic, who once again issued the same ruling against KRIK.

KRIK appealed again but the new panel of the Court of Appeals decided to confirm the ruling.

he panel led by Judge Irena Vukovic, with Judges Jasna Lozuk and Stanislava Mitrovic, accepted Keranovic’s explanation that KRIK’s journalists had defamed the police officers by, as the judgment states, characterizing them as regime affiliates, even though this was not stated anywhere in the article.

The court’s explanation included statements KRIK never made, such as allegations that the police were “filing lawsuits under regime orders to suppress media freedom.”

“The defendants’ value judgment that the plaintiffs, as regime-affiliated individuals, filed lawsuits alongside others to jointly pressure and silence KRIK, portraying the plaintiffs as individuals who file lawsuits under regime orders to suppress media freedom, lacks factual basis,” the verdict states.

The judges also ruled out the possibility of this case being a SLAPP lawsuit.

“The plaintiffs’ right to file lawsuits if they believe their constitutionally guaranteed rights have been violated cannot be disputed, and there is no evidence of procedural abuse by the plaintiffs,” states the verdict signed by Judge Vukovic.
The verdict is now final, and KRIK must pay the officers damages and legal costs. KRIK will seek a Supreme Court revision of the case and will appeal to the Constitutional Court.

Police officers lost previous case against KRIK

Before this lawsuit, the same three police officers had sued KRIK over an investigative story about the work of the Serbian Witness Protection Unit, but they lost the case, as the final verdict was in KRIK’s favor.
Judge Jasmina Vukovljak Jovanovic said at the time that KRIK had addressed a matter of public interest and adhered to journalistic standards.

“The information pertains to public interest, it is informing the public about the activities of individuals employed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, not their private lives,” the judge noted in her ruling.

The judges deciding on the second lawsuit did not even consider that KRIK had previously won in court, with the court acknowledging that KRIK had reported professionally on this police unit within the Serbian Ministry of Interior.

SLAPP lawsuits flood KRIK

This is the second definitive verdict against KRIK received just this month.

Recently, we were found liable in a lawsuit filed by Predrag Koluvija, who is on trial for allegedly organizing a criminal group that produced over a ton and a half of marijuana.

In addition to these two cases, KRIK is currently facing 14 more lawsuits initiated as SLAPPs.