Montenegro Rights Activist Sex Claims Spark Outrage

A group of around 100 Montenegrin journalists, opposition leaders and human rights activists protested on Tuesday against what they called the "shameless campaign" against Calovic by daily newspaper Informer.

Last week Informer released a video recording which it said offered “proof that Calovic is an animal abuser”, alleging that the director of the prominent MANS NGO had sexual relations with her two dogs. The paper published front pages stories in Serbia and Montenegro asking readers to "investigate" whether it was Calovic in the video.

The protesters symbolically trampled on pages from the Montenegrin edition of the Belgrade-based newspaper and demanded its closure.

“Vanja Calovic is a heroine of our times,” university professor Milan Popovic said at the rally.

MANS is an influential NGO in Montenegro and its work on corruption, organized crime and the misuse of state funds has brought it into conflict with the government, which accuses it of political bias.

It has particularly angered the authorities in recent months by publishing several reports and audio recordings which it claimed provide proof of serious wrongdoing by Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic’s governing Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS.

Tuesday’s protest was held outside the headquarters of the DPS, then moved to Informer's offices and ended in front of a building that houses an NGO called the Public Policy Institute, which is led by a former Serbian official, Vladimir ‘Beba’ Popovic.

Popovic used to be the information chief for the Serbian government and last year founded his own NGO in Montenegro and in Serbia. However he has been accused by some critics of being an informal media adviser to Djukanovic and Serbian PM...