Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša did not spend more than 20 minutes with the European Parliament’s Democracy, Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights Monitoring Group on Friday 26 March.
Mr Janša was expected to answer questions from MEPs who were concerned about the state of press freedom in the country (see EUROPE 12672/6) and who were questioned about the Prime Minister’s own abusive comments against journalists (see EUROPE 12661/23).
The hearing, however, was short-lived. The Slovenian Prime Minister, who had 15 minutes to present his views on the situation, spoke only briefly. He invited MEPs to go to Slovenia to see for themselves that “the situation there is quite different from what some have described here”.
Before him, the editor-in-chief of the Slovenian news agency STA, Barbara Štrukelj, had testified to the pressure her office was under, regularly accused of lying and manipulating public opinion, “even when we are only covering events or reporting government statements”.
The STA—a public service media, which the Prime Minister called a “national disgrace” on Twitter—was also deprived of a significant part of its income after the new government came to power. The latter “has not honoured its legal obligations to fund the agency, although it is obliged to do so by two laws”, Ms Štrukelj stressed.
A divisive video
Mr Janša, in his opening remarks, reiterated that his government had “nothing to hide”, but acknowledged that it was “entirely appropriate” for MEPs to deal with this issue provided that “things are dealt with objectively” and that he had “sufficient time to present his views”.
He therefore broke off after 5 minutes, calling for a video to be shown on the rest of his time. However, MEP Sophie in’t Veld (Renew Europe, the Netherlands), who chaired the meeting, said beforehand that it would be impossible to broadcast the video in question—entitled “Who really threatens the media and democracy in Slovenia?”
“You indicated that you wanted to share some video documents with us, unfortunately we received them very late, some arrived a few minutes before the meeting started, others after the meeting had already started”, Ms in’t Veld detailed, explaining that this posed a technical problem—particularly regarding interpretation—and that she would have liked to be able to discuss it with her colleagues.
“But I can assure you that we will look at them and the relevant information will be included in the file for the follow-up exercise”, she assured.
The Slovenian Prime Minister refused to listen to these arguments, quickly accusing the Parliament of having “pre-organised” the matter. “It seems that you don’t want to broadcast this video because of its content”, he said. This was repeatedly refuted by Ms in’t Veld, who agreed to the video being shown at the end of the meeting, as it was only available in English.
But after asking for the session to be suspended and for work to resume once the video was ready to be broadcast, Mr Janša disconnected, leaving the MEPs before even taking the time to listen to their questions. His Minister of Culture—who was expected to speak immediately afterwards—did not even show up.
The Slovenian government will hold the rotating Presidency of the EU Council for 6 months from July. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)