Reactions to Court’s Explanatory Note in FEROINVEST-IRL Case

The explanatory note over the Skopje II Basic Court’s verdict in FEROINVEST’s case against Investigative Reporting Laboratory (IRL) has sparked numerous reactions.

“It’s nothing new. This is yet another in the series of attacks against IRL, media independence, and freedom of speech,” IRL’s Saska Cvetkovska told MTV1 on Saturday.

The Court finding that IRL doesn’t have the capacity of a medium and that its members cannot present themselves as journalist has been fiercely criticised.

As President Stevo Pendarovski said, there mustn’t be labelling, discrediting, and regulating journalists and media, as was the case in the past, because such processes didn’t lead to democratic development. The Court mustn’t say who’s a journalist because that directly endangers freedom of expression, according to the Independent Trade Union of Media and Media Workers.

Deputy PM for Good Governance Policies Slavica Grkovska said freedom of expression, public interest, and free media were a society’s top priority.