The Council of Europe’s Safety of Journalists Platform recorded the case of the journalist Nikola Moraca as a case of "harassment and intimidation of journalists" committed by the authorities.

On 24 February, police in Banja Luka questioned the crime reporter Nikola Moraca on suspicion of violating the confidentiality of a criminal investigation and confiscated his phone. The previous day, Moraca had published an article alleging that local authorities failed to arrest a suspect in an investigation into the rape of an 18-year-old girl. On 24 February, police also questioned Sinisa Trkulja and Boris Lakic, editor and executive director respectively of SrpskaInfo, and Nebojsa Tomasevic, a reporter for the news website Glas Srpske, which published a summary of Moraca’s article.

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“At a support gathering, Moraca said he had received the news in the evening of 24 February that the police had looked for him the day before at EuroBlic and SrpskaInfo. The journalist immediately called a lawyer, and they both went to the Banja Luka police station, where police officers and prosecutors questioned him for three hours about his work and how he knew the initials of the suspect’s name. Moraca declined to reveal his sources and hand out his phone, even after he was told that if he did not reveal his sources, he would be considered a witness under Article 337 of the Criminal Code. He was then declared a suspect and had his phone seized without judicial warrant,” the CoE Safety of Journalists Platform noted.

Moraca, Trkulja, and Lakic currently remain suspects and could face up to one year each in prison if charged and convicted.