October 2024 in Europe and Central Asia: A special free expression and civic space round-up focusing on Romania, produced by IFEX’s Regional Editor Cathal Sheerin, and based on IFEX member reports and news from the region.
The threats to Romanian civic space; ICC asked to investigate “crimes against humanity” in Belarus; PACE resolution calls for inquiry into UK’s treatment of Julian Assange; the death in Russian detention of Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna.
With Romania set to hold parliamentary elections on 1 December – and the first and second rounds of a presidential election on 24 November and 8 December respectively – Romanian civic space is in the spotlight.
Effective, informed civic engagement during an election period requires a healthy civic space – one in which freedom of expression and access to reliable information is protected and promoted. Yet these two aspects of civic space are being undermined in Romania, even though the country is a functioning democracy with a diverse and pluralistic media.
This month, we take a look at some of the key threats to freedom of expression and access to information in Romania, and some of the work that IFEX members are doing to counteract these threats.
Disinformation
Among EU countries, Romania is one of the least resilient to disinformation, ranking second to last in a recent survey of media literacy. This makes Romanians especially vulnerable to conspiracy narratives (either spread online or promoted by populist politicians).
The worrying consequences of this vulnerability can be seen in a 2024 study, which finds that more than 48% of Romanians believe that “many very important things” happen in the world, about which ordinary people are never informed; that over 45% of Romanians believe that “there are secret organisations that greatly influence political decisions”; and that over 30% of Romanians are convinced that the election results in democratic countries are “controlled” and not decided by the voters.
Various independent media outlets and civil society organisations (CSOs), including local IFEX members, work to debunk false narratives and help build resilience to disinformation in Romania. The Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ) provides media literacy training for children, teachers, librarians and journalists. ActiveWatch also provides training and resources for combating disinformation, with a view to promoting civic engagement.
SLAPPs
In Romania, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) continue to present a risk to journalists, human rights defenders and CSOs. These lawsuits – which are intended to gag or intimidate into silence journalists and activists publishing material in the public interest – are most likely to come in the form of civil defamation cases claiming moral or material damages. Many claimants who bring SLAPPs explicitly aim to silence the subjects of these lawsuits by asking the courts to prohibit them from making further public statements about the cases.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the number of these abusive lawsuits is growing. Typical plaintiffs are politicians and powerful businesspeople. There is a recent trend in real estate developers bringing SLAPPs against CSOs and journalists. For example, the investigative news outlet Context.ro was sued in February 2024 by a local businessman seeking moral and material damages of €3.4 million: he claimed that he had lost a contract after the outlet published an investigation showing that the businessman had received €2 million from the state for building a golf course that didn’t exist.
Political capture of the media
A mission to Bucharest conducted by members of the Media Freedom Rapid Response platform (MFRR) in June 2024 concluded that “media coverage of Romania’s electoral campaigns is seriously compromised by political capture and that media are failing to provide the fair and balanced political reporting necessary for the public to make informed electoral choices”.
The main tool of media capture is the provision of state funding to political parties, which is then used to pay media for “press and propaganda” content. According to the MFRR, the sums in question are considerable – approximately 24 million euros in 2023, “with this set to rise significantly in 2024”.
Several media freedom groups and independent journalists have highlighted the lack of transparency over which parties fund which press outlets, the amounts of money involved, and the kind of content purchased. Although election campaign rules require detailed reports on spending by political parties, expenditure between campaigns is not made public.
And while political parties are prohibited by law from buying editorial content directly from broadcasters outside of the electoral period, they often get around this by contracting third-party advertising agencies. During these periods, the media receiving the money will rarely inform the public that its favourable coverage has been paid for by a political party. In recent years, there has been at least one case of a prominent journalist admitting to receiving money to write content favouring a political party, without that content being labelled as political advertising.
ActiveWatch provides a deep dive into this subject in its report Political Parties, Money and the Media – a Toxic Relationship.
Bureaucratic stonewalling
According to a report by CIJ, journalists in Romania cite access to information as one of their most pressing free expression concerns.
Law 544/2001, which guarantees “free and unrestricted access of [any] person to any information of public interest” has been in force for almost 23 years. But, according to CIJ, “it seems that it has never been so difficult to obtain information of public interest, whether it is journalists’ requests or [via] press conferences by the authorities”.
Journalists describe drawn-out battles to get information from public institutions. Those who request information citing Law 544/2001 frequently come up against a wall of bureaucratic stalling and evasion, in which the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is often cynically invoked. The GDPR, as one journalist told CIJ, has been “hijacked from its purpose, becoming an anti-transparency tool”.
Facing such obstacles, journalists are sometimes forced to take out lawsuits in order to access the information they require. However, the legal process in itself brings further delays, and by the time the journalist gets the information originally requested, the story has long ago moved on, or the public’s interest in it has waned.
For more on this subject – including a discussion about the occasions when institutions refuse to comply by a court ruling to release information – check out MFRR’s recent video ‘The Fight for Transparency: Romanian Journalists on FOI Failures‘.
Attacks on journalists
While there are few documented cases of serious safety incidents in recent years, journalists who cover politics or investigate large-scale business projects are still at risk of being targeted.
This most frequently takes the form of smears, cyber-bullying and verbal or digital threats – and the targets are most commonly women journalists. In their recent mission to Romania, MFRR partners found that in all but one of the cases they encountered where a journalist had been persecuted or harassed, that journalist was a woman. There was also a marked failure by the authorities to adequately protect these journalists.
The most high-profile recent example of this kind of attack on women journalists is the case of Emilia Șercan. After revealing plagiarism by former Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă and other prominent political and military leaders, she was subjected to a vicious smear campaign, which included the unauthorised publication of her private photos online. Following a deeply inadequate police investigation, in which no-one was held to account, the case was closed.
IFEX members and others suggested that there had been a “deliberate attempt to scupper the investigation and to protect the perpetrators of the crime”. There were also reasonable suspicions that police officers were involved in the campaign against Șercan, and that political parties had paid for online smears against the journalist.
In September 2024, however, a court ruled to re-open the investigation into the harassment of Șercan. In their ruling, the judges explicitly linked the attacks on Șercan to her public interest journalism and raised concerns about possible police complicity in the leaking of her private photos.
Șercan continues to expose plagiarism by high-ranking officials.
In brief
On 30 September, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced he would open a preliminary inquiry against Belarus after Lithuania requested that he investigate alleged crimes against humanity committed by the Lukashenka regime. In its referral to the prosecutor, Lithuania states that these crimes include “deportation, persecution and other inhumane acts”, which have been “carried out against the civilian population of Belarus”.
Meanwhile, the persecution of independent media continues: October saw the Belarusian authorities seize the property of exiled journalists; add convicted journalists to the list of “extremists”; and charge another journalist with “high treason”.
It was made public this month that Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna died in Russian detention in September. She was detained in August 2023 on occupied territory while reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; she was then transported to Russia. Although the circumstances of her death are unclear, Roshchyna was reportedly scheduled to be part of a prisoner exchange. IFEX members demanded that the Russian authorities investigate and clarify the details of Roshchyna’s death. Ukrainian media professionals called on the UN, ICRC, OSCE and PACE to urgently address her death and the situation for all Ukrainian journalists held by Russia.
In October, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke in public for the first time since his June release from prison. Addressing the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), he talked about his experience of imprisonment and of the threat to press freedom posed by his prosecution. His speech, including a Q&A, can be viewed here. Following the event, PACE members passed a resolution recognising Assange as a “political prisoner”, noting that his treatment by the US and UK had undermined the protection of journalists and whistle-blowers worldwide. The resolution called on the UK authorities to conduct an “independent review of the treatment of Julian Assange… with a view to establishing whether he has been exposed to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, pursuant to their international obligations”.
In Russia, a worrying new bill that bans “propaganda” about so-called child-free lifestyles passed its first vote in the State Duma. Proposed by the ruling United Russia party, the ban would extend to mass media, advertisements, publishing, film, and the internet. Violations would incur large fines. HRW describes the bill as a “disaster” for women and free expression, “forcing sweeping self-censorship on individuals and institutions, much like the ‘gay propaganda’ ban did before it”.
In Turkey, the Parliament’s Justice Committee approved the so-called “agents of influence” bill, which provides stiff penalties for those suspected of “espionage” or operating as “foreign agents.” The International Press Institute called for the bill to be withdrawn because of the “significant threat” it poses to media and civil society. The draft legislation was expected to advance to the Parliament’s General Assembly for approval before the end of October.
