The publication of unconfirmed news has caused great harm to the victims and the investigation process itself. This was said in the workshop “Strengthening transparency in the justice system in Kosovo” where about 30 officials are participating for information from the prosecutorial and judicial system in Kosovo.
This workshop is being organized by the Center for Innovations and Development (CFID), where the participants are the information officers from the Prosecution Council of Kosovo, all basic prosecutions, as well as the Judicial Council of Kosovo and the courts in the country.
On the second day of the workshop, the sessions continue, where communication with the media and the public in the digital age is being discussed.
The head of the Information Office at the Supreme Court, Antigona Uka-Lutfiu, emphasized the need for a greater number of staff in the field of communication.
“We continue to be one person in the offices for information, which presents a special challenge in the opportunity to transmit as much information as possible, to inform the public as much as possible about developments in the judiciary, about judgments. So this is the main current challenge. Otherwise, transparency is increasing from year to year. A very large number of judgments are published every day. If I am not mistaken, we now have over 150,000 judgments published on the website.”
She also mentions the cases of publishing news without the confirmation of court spokesmen, which she considers to be the fundamental mistake.
“We have a large number of news portals that do more copy-paste journalism and that do not know the laws well and do not know the harm they can cause to the public or in the investigation of cases. And in this aspect, I think that there was an urgent need to regulate this area because there are cases where the investigations were damaged, when great harm was caused to the victims. The idea of publishing a news story without confirmation from competent persons, in this case from court spokesmen, is the fundamental mistake made in broadcasting news to the public,” she added.
The person responsible for public communication at the Prosecutorial Council of Kosovo, Bedri Gashi, said that there are challenges in achieving communication levels.
“We are lawyers of our institution, we advocate for the jobs, activities and tasks that we have competence in the tasks described to us and at the same time we constantly try to increase the level of cooperation with the media, civil society and others, the parties that are interested in cooperating with us. We carry out a double mission as a community, because we also advocate for the media within the institution, so it is a double mission. About which we discussed even today in the sessions of the day of the workshop. With the new Salary Law but also with the internal regulations of the prosecutorial system, we think that they should be rewarded for the work they do, because I think that in order to create a public communication officer with his experience and all his reach in the public a period of time must pass and public communication servers are not created easily, they must be stored in the system”, he emphasized.
The workshop which is being held in Durrës is following the sessions, where the management of inter-institutional communication with the public in crisis situations will be discussed.
This workshop with the theme “Strengthening transparency in the justice system in Kosovo”, is being held by the Center for Innovations and Development (CFID) in cooperation with the Kosovo Law Institute (KLI) and is financed by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo – UNMIK. /Sh. Pajaziti
