His Excellency Slobodan Milosevic
President of Yugoslavia
Belgrade
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Vienna 9 March 1999

Your Excellency,

The International Press Institute (IPI) strongly condemns the sentencing of three journalists to five-month prison terms.

On 8 March, the owner of the daily Dnevni Telegraf, Slavko Curuvija, and two journalists, Srdjan Jankovic and Zoran Lukovic, were convicted of criminal defamation and sentenced by a Belgrade court to five months in prison for having published an article on 5 December 1998 which suggested that Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Milovan Bojic was linked to the killing of a medical doctor. The journalists were given eight days to lodge an appeal.

The criminal suit against Dnevni Telegraf was filed by Bojic, who also heads a medical centre in Belgrade, after the independent paper implicitly accused him of being involved in the murder of a surgeon, Alexander Popovic, who worked at the clinic. Judge Krsto Bobot said the jail sentence was appropriate to the crime and would serve as a warning to others not to use the media to make murder accusations.

IPI; the global network of editors and media executives, maintains that journalists should be judged by civil laws and not by criminal statutes, which are inappropriate for dealing with defamation. Anybody who feels harmed can seek redress through the civil courts in the form of a retraction, apology or compensatory payment for demonstrable damages. Issuing prison sentences to impede the free flow of ideas and opinions is quite plainly not compatible with democratic principles. We therefore urge you to do everything in your power to ensure that the prison sentences imposed on the three journalists are annulled.

We thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

Johann P. Fritz
Director