Original article in Serbian was published on 16/12/2021
Original article in Montenegrin was published on 20/12/2021
Last week, the media reported that Denmark would send some of its prisoners to Kosovo.
However, some people used this news to present the mentioned information inaccurately and sensationally. Inaccurate claims about the story first appeared in Serbian media and tabloids.
“THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION IS SENDING PRISONERS TO KOSOVO: Thousands will come, the bitter argument has already begun”, the website Srbija Danas writes, revealing in the following text that it is about Denmark.
Serbian tabloid alo.rs states that Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti “started importing hefty prisoners”.
“The unrecognized state of Kosovo has signed an agreement with Denmark, based on which it will take over hundreds of prisoners from that country who have been sentenced to long prison terms for serious crimes they have committed”, states alo.rs.
After the media from Serbia, these claims reached the media space and social networks in Montenegro and the rest of the SEE region as well.
However, things are not as the mentioned media present them.
Denmark will indeed send some of its prisoners to Kosovo, but it is not about thousands, as presented by srbijadanas.rs. Denmark is trying to solve the problem of overcrowding in prisons, so their government plans to rent prison places for 300 prisoners.
This is asserted in the statement of the Danish Ministry of Justice, which explains that “it was decided to lease 300 prison places in Kosovo and to expand the capacity of prisons in Denmark by several hundred prison cells”.
According to the statement, the prison cells in Kosovo will be intended for “foreigners sentenced to deportation”.
“As compensation for this, the Republic of Kosovo will receive 210 million euros, which will be earmarked for capital investments, especially for renewable energy sources”, the statement said.
The project that Denmark plans to implement will rent 300 prison cells in Kosovo “so that foreigners sentenced to deportation can be sent to Denmark after serving their sentence”, the AP reported.
The same project also plans to increase the capacity of the Danish prison system by 326 prison places in the period from 2022 to 2025.
So, the information published by the website srbijadanas.rs is not accurate because it is not about thousands of prisoners but about 300 people.
This post was analyzed by our colleagues from Raskrikavanje.
Due to all this, the publications of the websites srbijadanas.rs and alo.rs receive a rating for disinformation.
The rating “disinformation” is given to a media report that contains a “mixture” of facts and inaccurate or semi-true content. In such cases, the media does not need to be necessarily aware of the inaccurate information published along with the truth. Also, this assessment will be given to reports that have false attributions or titles that do not reflect the text in terms of information accuracy.
Edit: 12/23/2021
The websites Alo and SrbijaDanas published a correction in their original text, clearly using the ethical standard of professional conduct of journalists and refuted the original allegations, so we give them a rating for refuted. The rating “refuted” is given in cases when the media determines that the content falls under one of the above-described negative ratings and refutes it in a clear and visible manner, in accordance with the principles.
