Serbia's threat arrests skip the fear test, Sabic warns
Serbia's first information commissioner says prosecutors handling threat cases against officials increasingly leave out the one thing the law requires, proof that the target was actually frightened.
Rodoljub Sabic, a lawyer and Serbia’s first Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, said on July 29 that the growing number of arrests over alleged threats to public officials is a cause for concern, and that prosecutors are increasingly skipping the element without which there is no crime at all. That element is fear on the part of the person the threat was aimed at.
Two arrests in the past few days prompted the comment. S. S. from Kragujevac is accused of posting a video on social media containing direct and vulgar death threats against Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, while M. F. from Sabac is accused of a post threatening Dragan J. Vucicevic, editor-in-chief of the daily Informer. Both files are being handled by the High-Tech Crime Unit of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade. S. S. exercised his right to remain silent during questioning, prosecutors asked for both men to be detained, and the pre-trial judge at the Higher Court in Belgrade ordered detention for S. S.
Sabic is not objecting to the fact that such cases are opened. He is objecting to what goes unexamined once they are.
“For that criminal offence to exist, the threat alone is not enough, it is necessary that the threat also caused fear, that is, a sense of being endangered in the person it was addressed to,” Sabic said.
The argument is a legal one rather than a political one. Endangering safety is an offence defined by its consequence, and that consequence is not inferred from the wording of a post, it is established with the injured party. Sabic argues that prosecutors are now deliberately failing to carry out that assessment.
What Article 138 actually says
The sentencing range explains why the difference between an ordinary and an aggravated threat matters so much. In an earlier piece on the same offence, Sabic pointed out that endangering the safety of an ordinary citizen carries a fine or up to one year in prison, while for protected persons, the president among them, the range is six months to five years.
The same text, posted on the same network by the same author, can therefore fall into two entirely different regimes depending on who it names. When the target is an official, the maximum sentence is five times longer, and prison stops being an alternative to a fine and becomes the only outcome on the books.
Sabic warns that in practice people are taken in and questioned by police or prosecutors even when a message never reaches the threshold of a threat.
“Even though a message does not constitute endangering safety, the person who sent it is questioned by the police or the prosecution, and is even deprived of liberty,” the former commissioner said.
His conclusion goes further than any single file. The procedure itself produces an effect, including in cases that end with the complaint being dropped or with an acquittal.
Does the punishment start before the verdict?
Two earlier cases Sabic points to show what that looks like in numbers. Prosecutors sought 30 days of detention for Z. Dj., an engineer from Novi Sad, and the court refused. A. J. A. spent six months in detention over a post before the Appellate Court concluded that it was not a threat against the president and could at most amount to insult.
Six months in custody matches the lower end of the sentencing range for an offence the defendant was ultimately cleared of. That figure is the core of Sabic’s case, because it shows that a measure applied before guilt is established can last as long as a sentence that was never handed down.
That is why he treats the run of cases as a constitutional question rather than a series of unrelated files.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and must not be subjected to restrictions that are not based on exceptional needs,” Sabic said.
The line the courts have yet to draw
We reported the detention requests in these two cases on July 27 and the court’s decision a day later. Sabic’s assessment is the first legal comment on the pattern itself. The counter-argument is not a weak one. In the S. S. file, prosecutors describe a video with explicit death threats, and that is the category where a sense of danger is rarely disputed. The contested ground is milder material, insults and abuse that get logged as threats.
The practical consequence will be measurable in the case statistics. If most of these files end in dropped complaints or acquittals, Sabic’s claim that the threshold has been set too low will be borne out. If they end in convictions, the open question becomes why detention was needed to get there.
The first firm date is the expiry of the detention ordered for S. S. That is when it becomes clear whether prosecutors press the full charge or reclassify the case, as the Appellate Court has already done once.
