(WiPC/IFEX) – On 3 June 2000, a three-month sentence against Dusica Radulovic, for articles published in her newspaper, was upheld and she was ordered to enter prison. International PEN is alarmed by the sentence, considering it to be a direct attack upon the independent media in Serbia, and is urging that Radulovic not be imprisoned. […]
(WiPC/IFEX) – On 3 June 2000, a three-month sentence against Dusica Radulovic, for articles published in her newspaper, was upheld and she was ordered to enter prison. International PEN is alarmed by the sentence, considering it to be a direct attack upon the independent media in Serbia, and is urging that Radulovic not be imprisoned.
Radulovic is the director of “Borske Novine”, a local newspaper based in Bor, southern Serbia. Between January 1997 and January 1998, her newspaper published a number of articles (not written by Radulovic) said to libel Bor municipal officials. These articles led to Radulovic being charged and subsequently convicted by the Bor municipal court to three months in prison. On 3 June, the Zajecar District Court upheld the sentence and she was issued with an order to enter prison within a few days.
The decision to have the case heard in Zajecar District Court rather than in Bor is controversial. Lawyers point out that the Zajecar court has a history of passing harsh sentences in free expression cases. Among them are the cases of Boban Miletic, a writer sentenced to five months in prison in mid-June (see IFEX alert of 21 June 2000), and the upholding of a one-year sentence against an editor for TV Soko, Nebojsa Ristic, in 1999 (see IFEX alerts of 17 March and 3 February 2000, 12 December, 29 and 19 November, 17 August, 27 April and 29 March 1999).
On 12 June, Miroslav Radulovic, husband of Radulovic and editor-in-chief of “Borske Novine”, and Bozidar Bogdanovic, a writer, appealed to the Zajecar District Court and to the president of the Serbian Supreme Court to allow them to serve Radulovicâs sentence in her place. They pointed out that although she is the editor of the newspaper, Radulovic had not written the “offending” articles and played no editorial role. They also pleaded on humanitarian grounds, saying that her primary school child and twenty-nine year-old daughter who suffers from cerebal palsy need their motherâs constant care. Radulovic is himself currently on trial for a photomontage of the Yugoslav president.
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