EU Urges Would-Be Members to Protect Probing Journalists

“The EU promotes freedom of expression in its dialogues with enlargement countries and supports excellence in investigative journalism,” Lunacek said on Friday.

“Candidates and prospective candidates for EU membership must ensure journalists can do their job without fear of violence and intimidation,” she added

Lunacek’s statement comes on the heels of a report by the SEE Change Network, an environmental group, which said that journalists "who are brave enough to try and confront powerful figures in society have been pressurized, threatened or harassed or even sued for simply trying to expose wrong doing".

Over the past two weeks BIRN has published a series of investigations, which revealed how the inner circle around Albania's former Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, earned millions of euro from suspect land deals in an energy park.

The report, Winners and Losers: Who benefits from high-level corruption in the South East Europe energy sector? sums up a number high-profile corruption cases that have affected the energy sectors in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, illustrating how corruption affects the sustainability of these countries’ energy systems.

The report includes the case of former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader who was convicted for receiving a ten-million-euro bribe from the Hungarian company MOL, as well as the acquittal Albania’s parliamentary speaker, Ilir Meta, of corruption charges over an alleged bribe for the construction of a hydropower plant.