Foreign Agents Law

In late November 2024, members of parliament from the Movement of Socialists - a pro-government coalition partner led by Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin - submitted a draft law to the National Assembly that would require organizations receiving more than 50% of their funding from foreign sources to register as agents of foreign influence, disclose detailed information about their activities and finances, and submit to regular and ad-hoc inspections. Failure to register could result in fines of up to 17,000 euros. Although presented as a transparency measure, the proposal's broad definition of political activity, oversight mechanisms, and political context - including senior officials publicly describing civil society organizations as "foreign mercenaries" - drew comparisons to similar laws in Russia, Georgia, Hungary, and Republika Srpska, which have been used to pressure civil society and independent media.

Serbia's Administration for the prevention of money laundering, operating under the Ministry of Finance, requested comprehensive financial checks on five civil society activists from all banks in Serbia, invoking the Law on the prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing. The requests were signed by acting director Željko Radovanović, a former BIA member, and covered account balances, transaction records, authorized signatories, and safety deposit boxes. The move repeats a near-identical abuse from January 2019, when the Administration requested data on 57 individuals and organizations - including investigative journalists and NGOs - which subsequently appeared in pro-government tabloids as part of a smear campaign. All five activists described the action as politically motivated intimidation, coming as student protests continued to spread across the country.

On 21 January 2025, plainclothes police officers detained a group of civil society workers from Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Romania, and Albania at a Belgrade hotel, transporting them in unmarked vehicles to the Novi Beograd police station. The detainees had come to participate in the Erste Academy program and were held for several hours before being required to sign an administrative decision - written in Serbian and Cyrillic script, which most of them do not understand - stating that their stay constituted an unacceptable security risk, without specifying any concrete grounds. Each person was given 24 hours to leave Serbia and banned from re-entering for one year. Civil society organizations across the region condemned the detentions as unlawful and part of a broader effort to reinforce narratives about foreign agents and outside interference.