On Our Radar

Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

2 October 2026

On Our Radar this week: Bosnia’s public broadcaster BHRT narrowly avoids a shutdown of its operations after a month-long account freeze, and Slovenians prepare to vote on abolishing RTV Slovenija’s licence fee without an alternative in place.

On Our Radar this week…

PMA remains concerned for the future of BHRT, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s public broadcaster, following the acute threat it faced when its bank accounts were blocked for over a month, forcing programming cuts and leaving more than 700 staff uncertain whether they would be paid. The blockage, tied to a longstanding debt dispute with entity broadcaster RTRS, was only lifted in late September after a government minister personally intervened with the Sarajevo court handling the case. The minister himself was clear that this does not resolve BHRT’s underlying problems.

As we said in a March edition of OOR, this crisis is not new and BHRT has faced existential funding pressure for years. BH Journalists, the country’s journalists’ association, has warned that BHRT’s closure would mean the collapse of the entire public broadcasting system of BHRT, RTVFBiH, and RTRS, potentially making Bosnia and Herzegovina the only country in the Western Balkans without a public broadcaster at the national level.

A broadcaster whose ability to pay its staff and stay on air should not depend on a minister’s last-minute appeal to a court as it remains exposed to the same risk recurring at any time. BHRT requires a secure and predictable funding model and PMA calls on the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to move beyond case-by-case interventions and establish a stable, independent funding model for BHRT that ends the cycle of financial crisis. We also urge European institutions to treat this as an urgent test of media freedom and democratic resilience, considering Bosnia and Herzegovina’s position as an EU candidate country. Read more via N1.

PMA is also sounding the alarm once more on the dire situation facing public media in Slovenia, where Slovenians will soon vote on abolishing RTV Slovenija’s licence fee without any credible, funded alternative yet in place. The referendum, set for 11 October, does not specify how the broadcaster would be financed if the fee is scrapped, and a separate bill proposing a shift to direct state budget funding – which contains no binding long-term indexation or guarantee of its real value – has been postponed by parliament until after the vote. As PMA has repeatedly said, budget-dependent financing would leave RTV Slovenija’s funding dependent on an annual political negotiation, rather than protected from it. Separate governance amendments would also hand government appointees a majority of seats on a new supervisory council with the power to appoint and dismiss RTV Slovenija’s director general, while automatically terminating the mandates of its current oversight bodies.

We maintain our calls for the licence fee system to be retained or, at minimum, to ensure no replacement model takes effect until it offers the same guarantees of independence, adequacy and predictability. We also urge the Slovenian government to ensure that any changes to RTV Slovenija’s funding and governance comply fully with the European Media Freedom Act.

PMA Advocacy Team