Since January 2022, Șercan has received threatening emails and social media messages, and several intimate photos of her were shared online after she published an article alleging that then-Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă plagiarized his doctoral dissertation.
CPJ and other organizations previously wrote to Romanian authorities in 2022 and 2023, calling for a swift and independent investigation into Șercan’s case.
Read the full statement here:
]]>Despite earlier calls to Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă and other government officials, authorities have failed to investigate the harassment of Șercan, the letter states. Starting in January 2022, Șercan received threatening emails and social media messages, and several intimate photos of her were shared online after she published an article alleging that Ciucă had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation.
The organizations renewed their call on authorities to prioritize the investigation and dedicate sufficient resources to it, and address an ongoing smear campaign aimed at discrediting Șercan’s journalism.
]]>Since January, Șercan has received threatening emails and social media messages, and several intimate photos of her were shared online, after she published an article January 18 alleging that Ciucă had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation.
CPJ and other organizations previously wrote to Romanian authorities in April 2022, calling for a swift and independent investigation into Șercan’s case. In the June 28 letter, CPJ and other groups say that “law enforcement authorities seem to have failed” to make progress in the case and that “authorities are neither designating the investigation a priority, nor devoting sufficient resources to it.”
The full text of the letter can be read here.
]]>Since January, Șercan has received threatening emails and social media messages, and several intimate photos of her were shared online, after she published an article alleging that Ciucă had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation.
In the letter, the groups state that they have “serious concerns” about Șercan’s case, as well as its broader implications for press freedom in the country. The letter calls on authorities to thoroughly investigate whether any law enforcement officials leaked information related to Șercan’s case, and to hold all those responsible for harassing the journalist to account.
The full text of the letter can be read here.
]]>Since January 18, when Șercan published an article alleging that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, she has been the target of harassment and smears campaign, according to Șercan, who spoke with CPJ by phone and email, a detailed account written by Șercan for her outlet, independent news website PressOne; and local reports. Șercan received a series of threatening email and social media messages and several intimate photos of her were shared on various adult and news websites.
Șercan believes the actions are part of a broader campaign in retaliation for her reporting, she told CPJ. She additionally claims that screenshots she provided to the police were leaked from her file and published on other websites, and that she believes “Romanian authorities first orchestrated and then disguised an operation meant to discredit” her.
“The threats and the suspicion of leaking evidence from a criminal investigation represent yet another attempt to silence me and make me abandon my work,” Șercan told CPJ, adding that she had her mobile phone analyzed by two independent cybersecurity teams, but they were unable to find proof of hacking, leading her to believe that police supplied the screenshots.
“Romanian authorities must ensure that Emilia Șercan can continue her reporting without fear and intimidation and investigate the journalist’s claims that state officials may have been involved in the campaign,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “It is totally unacceptable to harass an investigative journalist with information and photos involving her private life.”
On January 19 and February 2, Șercan received an email – reviewed by CPJ – calling her names and threating her privacy if she continued investigating the prime minister. She filed two criminal complaints with police.
An unknown person sent Șercan a private Facebook message on February 16, which contained five intimate photos of her from around 20 years ago. On February 17, she contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation into the two previous criminal complaints and shared screenshots of the messages, which included the photos.
On February 18, the screenshot appeared on a Romanian language news website in Moldova, and then was shared by more than 70 Moldovan and Romanian websites. Șercan filed a third criminal complaint with police, and a fourth complaint for the possible leak.
In response to CPJ’s questions, the Bucharest police confirmed that a criminal investigation is ongoing but did not provide any further details.
In 2019, Șercan received death threats after she reported on alleged plagiarism by a former education minister, the dean of the police academy, and graduates of the country’s national security and intelligence academies, as CPJ documented at the time. As a result of the criminal investigation into the death threats, a police officer pled guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison and the dean and vice dean of the police academy were sentenced to three years for inciting blackmail, according to Șercan and news reports.
]]>Since May 20, prosecutors at the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, a judiciary agency tasked with investigating and prosecuting organized crime and terrorism-related offenses, have questioned four employees of the daily newspaper Libertatea and the weekly magazine Newsweek Romania over their outlets’ coverage of alleged corruption in public works contracting, according to reports by both outlets.
On May 20, prosecutors in Bucharest questioned Libertatea editorial coordinator Cătălin Tolontan and reporter MihaI Toma, and the following day questioned Newsweek Romania reporter Mircea Marian and office manager Andrei Sabin Orcan, according to those reports as well as Libertatea editor-in-chief Dan Duca and Newsweek Romania editor-in-chief Sabin Orcan, Andrei Sabin’s father, who both communicated with CPJ via email.
Duca and Orcan told CPJ that prosecutors interrogated the employees in relation to a criminal complaint filed by Daniel Băluță, the mayor of the Bucharest’s Section 4, who oversaw the public contract that the outlets alleged was corrupt.
According to Duca and Orcan, Băluță denied the allegations and accused the four of establishing an “organized criminal group” to blackmail him into changing that contracting decision in favor of a company that the journalist supported, with the promise of “financial gain.” Orcan denied that the journalists had any connection to that company.
According to the Romanian criminal code, blackmail and establishing an organized crime group are each punishable by up to five years in prison.
“It is essential for journalists to be able to freely report on the use of public funds without fear of being harassed by law enforcement agencies,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Romanian authorities should drop their investigation into employees of Libertatea and Newsweek Romania, and public officials should withstand scrutiny from the press rather than harass journalists for doing their jobs.”
Orcan told CPJ that the authorities’ summons related to an article Newsweek Romania published on March 15, which Libertatea summarized and quoted on March 16, alleging that the municipality was trying to fix a contract for a specific company that Băluță favored. The Newsweek Romania article was published by “Alexandru Pop,” a pseudonym.
Orcan told CPJ that Newsweek Romania stood by the reporting, which was based on public records. He called the mayor’s accusations “totally absurd” and “a form of intimidation against any investigative reporting about his administration.” Duca told CPJ that the mayor´s accusations constituted “a serious form of intimidation.”
Orcan said that his colleagues were accompanied by the magazine’s lawyers, and prosecutors questioned them in the presence of Băluță’s lawyer.
Prosecutors asked the Newsweek Romania employees about who had authored the article, why the newspaper published it, and the identities of the reporter’s sources, Orcan said. He added that his colleagues told the prosecutors that they had nothing to do with the decision to publish the article, and said he believed authorities had accidentally summoned his son, who has only administrative tasks in the office.
“My conclusion is that they have mixed up my name with my son’s name. So right now, I am expecting to be summoned as well,” Orcan told CPJ.
After the publication of this article, the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism emailed a statement to CPJ saying that the journalists were questioned “only as witnesses and not being accused of any criminal offence,” and said they were not questioned about their sources.
The statement said that prosecutors dropped the investigation into the organized crime allegation on June 7, and had referred the blackmail allegation to the Bucharest Fourth District prosecutor’s office.
CPJ emailed Daniel Băluță’s office for comment, but did not receive any reply.
[Editors’ note: This article has been updated to include the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism’s response to CPJ.]
]]>On June 11, an unidentified man using an anonymous phone number called Oncioiu, an investigative reporter at independent news websites Dela0 and Sa Fie Lumina, and threatened to kill her if she continued to write about the Romanian Orthodox Church, according to the reporter, who communicated with CPJ via email, and news reports.
Oncioiu filed a criminal complaint with the Bucharest police on June 11 after receiving the call, Romanian daily Adevărul reported, and the journalist confirmed in an email to CPJ.
“Threatening to kill a reporter because of her coverage is completely unacceptable, and Romanian authorities must thoroughly investigate the death threat made against reporter Diana Oncioiu and ensure her safety,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said in New York. “Journalists reporting on affairs of public interest should be able to work free from intimidation and threats.”
In an interview with the Romanian edition of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. Congress-funded media outlet, Oncioiu said that the threat was likely related to her ongoing investigative work into allegations of pedophilia and other abuses at a theological seminary in Huși, a town in Eastern Romania.
Sa Fie Lumina confirmed that a threat had been made against one of its reporters and vowed to continue its investigative work into alleged sexual abuse at the seminary, according to a post on the outlet’s Facebook page.
Speaking with Romanian news website HotNews, Vasile Bănescu, a spokesperson for the Romanian Orthodox Church, rejected any association with the threats and said he hoped the perpetrator would be identified.
CPJ emailed the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Romanian Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the police, but did not immediately receive a response.
In April, Romanian investigative reporter Emilia Șercan received similar death threats after reporting on alleged plagiarism by a former education minister, as CPJ reported at the time.
]]>Șercan, who reports for independent Romanian news website PressOne, received a text message with death threats from an unknown number on April 15, she told CPJ and also wrote on her Facebook page. The message included explicit death threats and a demand for Șercan to stop her investigative reporting, according to a screenshot of the text reviewed by CPJ and translated by Șercan.
Șercan filed a complaint with the police on April 15, she told CPJ. The minister of interior, Carmen Dan, announced in a Facebook post yesterday that an investigation had been opened into the complaint.
“Romanian authorities should take all necessary measures to ensure investigative reporter Emilia Șercan’s safety,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said. “Law enforcement should act quickly to identify those responsible and hold them to account. Journalists reporting on issues of public interest should be protected and praised, not threatened.”
Șercan has reported on alleged plagiarism by a former education minister and by graduates of the country’s national security and intelligence academies, prompting 10 resignations and at least 16 people being stripped of their degrees, according to a CPJ review of her reporting at PressOne.
CPJ emailed the general directorate of police of Bucharest, the Romanian capital, but did not immediately receive a response.
]]>The GDPR is an EU regulation covering how companies protect personal data and giving control to individuals over their data. Analysts, however, said they think that the Romanian authority is abusing the law, which was set up to protect the data privacy of EU citizens, not to curtail the press.
The problems for Rise Project started in November, when it published a teaser on Facebook about its investigation into allegations of corruption involving Liviu Dragnea, the president of the ruling party. The Facebook post showed the contents of a suitcase that the Rise Project said it received from an anonymous source in the fall, containing documents, files, emails, photos from a memory stick, and a tablet that appeared to establish links between a local road construction company, Tel Drum SA, and Dragnea.
Romania’s anti-corruption directorate a year earlier had charged Dragnea with setting up an organized crime group to defraud millions of euros of EU funds. Dragnea has denied the charges and denied having links with Tel Drum, according to reports.
A few days after the Facebook post, the Romanian Data Protection Authority– the state body responsible for the protection of personal data privacy–sent a letter (English translation here) to Rise Project alleging that the outlet had breached data privacy rules. The authority cited the GDPR and ordered the journalists to explain how and when they obtained the information, who their source was, how they stored the documents, and what other personal information they had on Dragnea, Tel Drum executives, and their friends. The authority demanded that the reporters return the information within 10 days or face a fine of 644 euros for each day of delay. Failure to comply would result in a fine of up to 20 million euros, the letter said.
“There is a history of government authorities using legal means to intimidate and harass us,” said Paul Radu, the co-founder of Rise Project, which is part of the international Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Radu told CPJ that the speed at which the authority reacted was surprising as many cases submitted by citizens linger for months without action. Radu said he believes political motives were behind the move, adding that the head of the data protection authority, Ancuța Gianina Opre, was appointed by the ruling party and is indicted by the anti-corruption directorate in an unrelated case for abuse of office in a previous job at a different state body.
In an email to CPJ, the data protection authority denied that the order was politically motivated and emphasized that the body was “an autonomous and independent public authority in the performance of its tasks and the exercise of its powers.”
Dragnea has mocked the investigative outlet’s report, arriving in parliament on November 5 with a suitcase that he said contained “donuts from Rise Project.” He added that what the Rise Project journalists presented was a lie and had nothing to do with him.
It isn’t the first time Rise Project has faced action over its reporting on Dragnea. On July 6, 2017–the day the outlet had announced it would publish an article on a separate investigation into Dragnea–the Romanian Anti-Fraud Authority raided its office on accusations of suspected fraud, according to rights groups. The anti-fraud investigation failed to find evidence of wrongdoing, according to reports. Dragnea had previously warned journalists covering that corruption case that that he was ready to fight back, even saying in a TV interview that “peace is over.”
The ruling party spokesperson did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment.
Raluca Radu, (no relation to Paul Radu) a journalism professor at the University of Bucharest, said that the latest action against the Rise Project fits into a pattern in Romania. “The legislative framework is nice and European, but often these very same laws are misused by the authorities to pressure journalists,” she said, adding that in the past three years, the attacks seemed to intensify. Raluca Radu said that what made the current case difficult was that the legal right to protect sources was still weak in Romania because it is enshrined only in the audiovisual code for radio and TV, and not for print or online outlets.
“The Romanian authority not only wrongly interprets EU regulation, but clearly contradicts the law and its objectives,” said Estelle Massé, a senior policy analyst at the international advocacy organization Access Now.
Massé said that the GDPR established a fine balance between the protection of personal data and the fundamental right to freedom of the expression and information, and made a clear exception for data acquired for journalistic purposes. Article 85 of the GDPR says that EU states need to “provide for exemptions or derogations” when data is processed “for journalistic purposes.”
In response to questions from CPJ, the Romanian data protection authority cited a paragraph of Romanian law–aimed to comply with the GDPR and approved in 2018–as a basis for its request to the Rise Project, and emphasized that the authority’s “actions fall exclusively within the legal competences, without prejudice to the freedom of the press.”
“The member state cannot interpret the law as it wants, this is clearly a case of abusing the law,” said Massé, adding that a member state cannot ultimately contradict the jurisprudence and guidance given by the EU.
Massé said that a similar situation arose in Spain, where the government failed to implement the GDPR in line with EU jurisprudence by passing legislation allowing political parties to use personal data obtained from web pages and other publicly accessible sources. Advocacy groups have warned that the new law could pave the way for parties to create “ideological profiles.”
“We expect the EU’s Data Protection Board and the European Commission to push the Romanian authority to rectify the error they have done,” Massé said. The role of the Commission is to make sure that the regulation is properly implemented. “If all those efforts fail, the last resort will be litigation at the EU courts,” she said.
The EU’s Data Protection Board refused to comment to CPJ on the Rise Project case as no decision was reached among the board members. However, during a general media briefing last year, European Commission spokesperson Margaritis Schinas said that “the GDPR clearly states that data protection has to be balanced against freedom of expression and information.” In response to a question about the action against Rise Project, he said that using the EU regulation “would be a clear abuse of the regulation.”
Paul Radu, from the Rise Project, said that the outlet’s lawyers have responded to the Romanian authority’s questions, without revealing sources, and said they were up to a legal battle if needed. “We will keep on working as before, these threats will not deter us,” he said.
[Reporting from Berlin]
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At the time of their arrest, Biro and Stoyanov were investigating allegations of fraud involving EU funds, for the global investigative reporting platform Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Bivol reported. Local police detained the journalists while they were documenting the alleged destruction of documents in a field near Radomir, after receiving a tip off, the website reported.
The report said that the journalists were working on a follow-up article to a story published in Bivol two days earlier about alleged corruption in infrastructure projects financed by the EU. Earlier in the day the journalists had notified the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior about the tip off alleging that documents and potential evidence were being destroyed, according to reports.
The regional news site Balkan Insight reported that local police handcuffed the journalists and kept them for an hour on the site, before taking the journalists to the police station in Radomir, where they were released without charge three hours later. Bivol reported that police also confiscated the journalists’ phones.
The Bulgarian police confirmed on its website on September 14 that it detained the two reporters until officers had verified their identity, because they were in an area under police surveillance. The statement said that the tips provided by the journalists prompted the police to start an operation near Radomir.
The journalists were working on an investigation as part of a project called “Exposing Fraud in EU-funded Projects in Romania and Bulgaria,” funded by the IJ4 EU fund of the European Commission and the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, Bivol reported.
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