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🇷🇸 Serbia /Elections & Politics

Student Surveillance Affair: Serbia’s President Accused of Exceeding His Powers Again

From N1 Serbia · () Serbian

Translated from Serbian and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Analysis Named sources Under investigation
  • Lawyers questioned President Aleksandar Vučić’s basis for denying allegations that at least 14 students and opposition members were targeted with spyware.
  • Attorney Ana Toskić-Cvetinović said the president’s comments raised concerns about oversight of security services, privacy rights and the burden of proof.
  • She argued that Serbian prosecutors, rather than alleged victims, should establish whether a criminal offense occurred.

How does Serbia’s president know that students were not surveilled, and why are the alleged victims being asked to prove a crime? Those are the questions lawyers are raising after Aleksandar Vučić denied claims that at least 14 students and opposition members had been monitored with spyware.

The latest surveillance controversy has been described as another affair in which the president exceeded his powers. Vučić called the students’ claims “nonsense without a single piece of evidence.” He then said that he himself had been monitored but had not complained.

I was wiretapped in this country when I was an opposition leader. They did it illegally after I became president as well. Did I make a scene over it or later persecute anyone in BIA? Never.

· Aleksandar VučićThe Serbian president denied the students’ surveillance allegations and referred to his own claimed experience of being monitored.

“I was wiretapped in this country when I was an opposition leader. They did it illegally after I became president as well. Did I make a scene over it or later persecute anyone in BIA? Never,” Vučić said.

Ana Toskić-Cvetinović, a lawyer and executive director of Partners Serbia, said the president’s confidence raised the first obvious question: where did his information come from? She said his powers include coordination among security services, meaning he could know whether a service had used the alleged illegal software only in that context.

Nonsense without a single piece of evidence.

· Aleksandar VučićVučić’s characterization of students’ claims that they had been surveilled.

She also criticized the message that citizens should accept surveillance or ask themselves why it happened. Toskić-Cvetinović called that argument one of the oldest spins in the history of privacy law, saying privacy and personal-data protection are universal rights that can be restricted only under legally defined conditions and with proportionality.

She further rejected the idea that students must prove someone committed a crime. Serbia’s criminal justice system, she said, places responsibility on prosecutors to respond, determine whether an offense occurred and begin an investigation. She described the alleged conduct as a serious criminal offense and said the public should be concerned when such acts are relativized by the president of the Constitutional Court and a law professor.

Privacy is a universal human right, and the right to personal-data protection is guaranteed by our Constitution.

· Ana Toskić-CvetinovićThe Partners Serbia executive director defended privacy protections while criticizing the president’s comments.
About this summary

Originally published by N1 Serbia in Serbian. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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