Belgrade, May 30, 2025.
The election for members of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM) entered a new phase. The Parliamentary Committee for Culture and Media is discussing them on Friday (May 30), and Citizen Initiatives found numerous irregularities among the proposers and candidates. A preliminary report with an analysis of the process so far has been published on the website www.remontuj.tv. The report will be supplemented with new findings in the coming period. On the same website, the documents submitted by the proposers and candidates during the current process of election of REM members were also published. The documents are distributed by groups of proponents and are ready for download, and others are invited to get involved in analyzing the documents, spotting illogicalities – and reporting to Citizen Initiatives if they find new evidence of irregularities.
Worse than last time – this is how Citizen Initiatives briefly describe the list of candidates for REM Council members and the organizations that nominated them.
Director of Civic Initiatives, Maja Stojanović, stated today that the new process for selecting members of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM) is more problematic than the previous one, adding that some proposed candidates have no days of work experience in the electronic media and that they have very questionable resumes.
At the Civic Initiatives press conference, where the findings of the analysis of the previous process for the selection of members of the REM Council were presented, she pointed out that in the new process there are many more proposers and candidates in all areas, but that the situation is problematic due to the large number of organizations that are close to the authorities and that do not meet the requirements.
Stojanović explained that the most problems were observed in the area of child protection, where the most illegitimate candidates were reported, who could disrupt the election process and affect its regularity, both in that area and in the entire process.
According to her, the good information is that in eight areas there are candidates who meet the requirements, which indicates that the Assembly has the possibility to elect an independent REM Council.
“What we see from the organization of those different proposers is that illegitimate candidates have the most proposers,” said Stojanović.
As she estimated, if there is an agreement in such a problematic composition of proposers and candidates, we will again get a REM that does not even meet the minimum requirements for work.
One of the authors of the analysis, Uroš Jovanović, assessed that the President of the Assembly, Ana Brnabić, presented incorrect information about Citizens’ Initiatives and candidate Antonela Riha at the press conference.
According to his view, the direct interference of Brnabić in the process is aimed at political pressure on the Committee for Culture and Information.
Jovanović emphasized that some candidates do not have publicly visible biographies and that it is impossible to find data on their social merits and work in the field of electronic media, and that some proposing organizations do not have published financial reports for the previous year.
He believes that the absence of this type of information undermines confidence in the commitment of these organizations to freedom of expression.
Watch the entire media conference in the video attachment: