Sarajevo, February 1, 2025 – The Steering Committee of BH journalists rejects any kind of political manipulation of the content of the announcement and the intention of BH Journalists to draw the public’s attention to the fact that the Government of Herzegovina-Neretva Canton (HNK) did not respect the principles of transparency, clear criteria and media scoring during the award of media grants in this canton. Also, with indignation, we reject the attempt of the HNK Government to do its own bad work and hide the list of grant winners, as well as shifting the Government’s responsibility to the field of generating conflicts between the media that did or did not receive the grant, i.e. the opening of a conflict between the Mostar media and BH Journalists.

This is not the first time that the HNK Government has tried to twist its own non-transparency into the mistakes of others or to blame them on certain media and BH Journalists.  It is enough to read the archive of announcements and public reactions of BH Journalists on the website www.bhnovinari.ba, in order to factually deconstruct this, as well as previous attempts and decisions of the HNK Government, which are against European standards of freedom of expression and media activity in democratic societies.

In support of this, we cite three more facts that testify to our own non-transparency in this last case:

The HNK government did not clearly state which model of application collection it was applying, nor did it clarify the method of scoring media acceptable for awarding a grant. In its reactions, the HNK Government states in one place that the media were selected on the basis of a public call, and in another that it is about “objective” proposals of local authorities from the cities and municipalities of the HNK.

Decision of 30.12.2024. year, to which the Government of the HNK refers and one part of which was made available to the media (the list of media and the amount of allocated funds), was not made public in its entirety even a month after it was adopted!?

Among the grant winners is a media outlet based in Sarajevo Canton, so it is unclear whether this was an allocation of funds for media outlets from HNK or funds are also allocated to media outlets based in other cantons. A logical question arises: why did only one media from KS have the exclusive right to the support of the Government of HNK and not other media from this or 8 other cantons!?

As for the very inappropriate accusations and attributes with which BH Journalists are labeled, they speak more about the HNK Government, its standards of public communication and the people who write its statements and denials, than about the association itself, and we will not comment on them.

In the past two decades, BH Journalists have repeatedly warned about, to say the least, “strange” criteria for allocating money to the media in CNK. We will continue to do so in the future, given that the HNK, nor any other canton or entity, nor the bodies of the state executive authority, do not respect the criteria of transparent financing of the media, but rather try to hide their decisions as deeply as possible from the public.  And that is certainly not the standard of the European Union, which, we repeat, has been asking domestic authorities for years to transparently allocate funds to the media in order to strengthen the quality of journalism, editorial independence and pluralism of media content, which, in the end, is the only one that can guarantee the work of the media in the interest of the public and not the parties in power or other interest groups.

Steering Committee of BH journalists