Belgrade, February 25, 2025.
Around 9:20 this morning, twenty police officers from the Criminal Police Directorate broke into the premises of Civic Initiatives, stating that they had a warrant from the Prosecutor’s Office to check the organization’s work, but they did not want to show the search warrant.
At the same time, in the House of Human Rights, the police also raided the Center for Practical Politics, an organization that does not have a USAID project at all – despite the fact that the regime media Informer, RTS and Kurir claim that the raids are connected to USAID’s funding of civil society.
This is a serious attack on basic civil rights and the continuation of illegal pressure on civil society in Serbia. The governing structures are trying to implement mechanisms of intimidation and persecution without adopting the Law on Foreign Agents, which has entered the parliamentary procedure, but has not yet been formally adopted. This use of the police for political purposes represents gross abuse of state institutions to deal with dissidents and continued suppression of free and democratic action in Serbia.
Civic initiatives strongly condemn this attack on civil society organizations and demand that the competent authorities immediately explain the basis for such an action and stop abusing institutions for political purposes.
We expect the reaction of the domestic and international public to this reckless trampling of democratic values and legal certainty.