Activists whistled President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović during a conference organized by the Croatian Journalists’ Society.
President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović was whistled during a video conference on media freedom which involved 16 countries from around the world, reports Index.hr on May 3, 2016.
The conference was organized via a video link at the premises of the Croatian Journalists’ Society in Zagreb, in cooperation with the Embassy of the United States in Croatia.
Activists representing the Workers’ Front raised the banner “Croatian government is killing the media” while the President was giving her speech. Some of the journalists and activists later left the great hall of the Croatian Journalists’ Society where the conference was held.
The video-conference was part of the event Problems of Media Freedom in Europe which was organized on the occasion of 3 May, which is the World Press Freedom Day, in collaboration with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the embassies of France, Norway and Sweden. One of the speakers was the President. The video-conference was moderated by Glenn Kessler, a veteran investigative reporter for the Washington Post, who spoke about the responsibility of governments and important public and private institutions towards citizens.
After the video-conference, the President reacted to the events on her Facebook profile: “I am disappointed that those who supposedly support the freedom of speech and media have interrupted me during a speech at the Journalists House. By not allowing me to express my opinion, they have demonstrated that they are not honest advocates of freedom of speech, but that they are activists. I will continue to consistently strive for the protection of press freedom and of responsibility for words spoken in public.”
