Sarajevo, September 26, 2025 – The Sttering Committee of the BH Journalists Association and the  Free Media Help Line strongly condemns the illegal publication of correspondence between Ms. Benjamina Karić, non-head of the Municipality of Novo Sarajevo, and journalist Almedin Šišić, editor of the Valter portal, in which she revealed the identity of Šišić’s minor daughter, publicly violating her child’s rights, dignity and privacy.

On Thursday, September 25, 2025, Mayor Benjamina Karić posted on her Facebook profile a message that journalist Almedin Šišić sent her almost three years ago, deliberately misleading the public that the critical texts against Karić, published on the Valter portal, were the result of Šišić’s daughter being denied assistance. Karić created her Facebook post to present herself as a “victim” of the journalistic texts and as if she was writing a post on the social network after a long “deliberation and delay”. In this way, she manipulatively tried to hide the fact that she had published the same information last year, after the Valter portal published a series of texts about the circumstances under which Karić bought a large apartment in the center of Sarajevo.

The Sttering Committee of the BH Journalists Association believes that by publishing the identity of the journalist’s minor daughter, Benjamina Karić violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Criminal Code of the Federation of BiH, the Law on the Protection of Personal Data of BiH, as well as numerous international standards for the protection of children from political and other abuses. Article 16 of the UN Convention expressly emphasizes that no child “may be exposed to arbitrary or illegal interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, as well as illegal attacks on his honor and reputation”, and recommends legal protection of children, if they are exposed to such attacks and interference. In addition to dragging a minor girl into her political showdown with a journalist in an unacceptable way, Mrs. Karić responded on Facebook to offensive, factually unfounded and hateful comments about the journalist Šišić and his daughter, tolerating their content and allowing the girl’s name and place of residence to be repeated and placed in an inappropriate political context.

The Sttering Committee of the BH Journalists Association is surprised by the brutality with which Benjamina Karić uses a minor girl in a confrontation with a media outlet, as well as the fact that this politician and public official, from a wide range of legitimate reactions to the media that she is not satisfied with, chooses to violate the rights of the child with a clear goal: to stop journalistic texts about how she performs her public duties!

The Sttering Committee of the BH Journalists Association demands that Benjamina Karić urgently remove from her FB profile hateful and other content that violates the legally protected rights of journalist Almedin Šišić and his minor daughter, and publicly apologize to them for the lynching she subjected them to, which is inhumane and contrary to all democratic values. At the same time, the Board of Directors of BH Journalists calls on the Ministry of Interior of the Sarajevo Canton, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Sarajevo Canton, UNICEF, and the Institution of the Ombudsman for Human Rights of BiH to investigate this case and sanction the unlawful interference in the privacy, personal and family life of journalist Šišić.

The Steering Committee of the Association of BH Journalists  recommends that Ms. Karić protect her civil rights, if they are violated by media content published on the Valter portal, by using the Law on Protection from Defamation of the Federation of BiH and/or by filing a complaint with the Press and Online Media Council in BiH.

The Sttering Committee of the BH Journalists Association

Photo by: Canva, ilustration