ZAGREB, 15 Oct 2021 - Health Minister Vili Beroš on Thursday told parents who had demonstrated in front of his home against restrictions on visits to sick children that he understood their dissatisfaction, but that the place for dealing with such matters should be the Health Ministry.

"Neither the Health Ministry nor epidemiologists limited the duration of visits to your sick children," Beroš told a group of parents who had said on Facebook they were protesting because the duration of visits to their sick children was limited to 15 minutes.

The minister said that the national COVID-19 crisis management team and epidemiologists had decided that the parents of sick children being treated in Croatian hospitals and health facilities must meet epidemiological requirements as all other visitors, which means they need to have an EU COVID certificate as proof that they have been vaccinated, have recovered from coronavirus or have been tested for COVID-19.

The organization, time, and duration of visits to sick children, the minister said, is organized by each institution in accordance with its organizational and spatial possibilities, and they are required to inform the parents.

"I understand the dissatisfaction of parents... and I will always stand by them as a doctor, minister, and parent, but I cannot accept the way in which they are expressing their protest," the health minister said.

According to media reports, about a dozen of citizens gathered outside the health minister's home at about 7 pm, at the invitation of a religious education teacher from Križevci, Ivan Pokupac, via Facebook.

In the post, Pokupec said that every day they would visit the home address of one member of the crisis management team for 15 minutes.

Pokupec also wrote that last year parents had been allowed to stay with their children in hospital for 15 minutes, but this time with an additional condition - an EU digital COVID certificate.

He said there was no scientific, epidemiological, or moral argument for this and that the additional requirement served to force the concerned parents to get vaccinated.

For the latest news on coronavirus in Croatia, follow the dedicated TCN section. 

For more about politics in Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

ZAGREB, 7 Oct 2021 - The Zagreb Municipal Court has sentenced Boris Štitić, 36, to two years and four months in prison pending an appeal for attempting to extort money from three members of the national COVID-19 crisis management team - Alemka Markotić, Krunoslav Capak, and Vili Beroš, Jutarnji List daily said on Thursday.

Štitić, a Slovenian and Croatian citizen, is a nurse with three convictions for fraud.

Under the latest sentence, he must also pay over HRK 10,000 in court costs. He has been released from detention, in which he had been since October 2020, and the stay behind bars will be counted towards the final sentence.

Although he claimed he was innocent at the start of the trial, he eventually confessed, justifying his actions with the COVID restrictions and the impossibility to see his child, who lives with the mother in Slovenia, during the pandemic, although a few weeks before sending threatening e-mails to the three officials, they spent several weeks on the coast.

The court did not find any mitigating circumstances, finding as aggravating that Štitić attempted to extort money from persons engaged in the fight against the pandemic and committing the offenses in an, especially odious manner, without any empathy for others, subjecting the victims to stress by making death threats against them and their families.

On 30 September 2020, Štitić sent e-mails to Markotić, Capak, and Beroš in which he said they would die unless they paid €100,000 in the Monero cryptocurrency.

Markotić is the director of Zagreb's Dr. Fran Mihaljević Infectious Diseases Hospital, Capak is the director of the Croatian Institute of Public Health, and Beroš is the minister of health.

For more about politics in Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

ZAGREB, 20 Sept 2021 - An eighth-grader from the Krapinske Toplice elementary school came to school wearing a protective mask on Monday morning, thus ending his two-week absence caused by his parent's decision to defy the face mask rule.

"The boy resumed attending classes, and e entered the school building, wearing a protective mask while being in the hall", the school's headmaster, Samson Štibohar, told Hina.

At the beginning of the new school year, the father of this eighth-grader had claimed that his child could not wear the protective mask. The rule applies only in common areas of the school building in this northern Croatian town.

The father and several people who supported him held a protest rally on 10 September outside the school and later raided the school building. The police responded to the unruly rally and filed reports against some of the demonstrators.

After that, the headmaster and local employees of the social welfare center held talks with the parents, and the headmaster said today that the only thing that was important was that that the student was back in school.

"We achieved an agreement that it is essential for the student to resume his classes as usual", Štibohar said.

For more, make sure to check out our dedicated lifestyle section.

ZAGREB, 18 Sept, 2021 - Commenting on the Freedom Festival rally, held in downtown Zagreb on Saturday, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković described as unserious the emotionalism regarding freedoms in Croatia in the context of the country's COVID-19 death toll and restrictions in other countries.

"I find the emotionalism regarding freedoms, after so many COVID-19 deaths and the cost for the health system, unserious," Plenković told reporters during a visit to Vukovar.

The organisers of Freedom Festival 2.0 have said that "most people now realise that COVID-19 has been misused for political ends that include the introduction of an entire set of measures and decisions that cause unprecedented damage to humans and benefit only smaller groups in positions of immense power."

"COVID-19 has been here for more than 20 months, and if there are people who are still not aware of the reality, they should check media reports and credible information to see how many people have died so far around the world, including Croatia," the PM said in a comment on the Zagreb rally.

He noted that in the past 24 hours 12 people died of COVID-19 and that only two had been vaccinated, one being a 95-year-old woman and the other a person with a serious illness.

"I call on all citizens to be reasonable, responsible, there is protection and I don't see why they would not follow the example of the 52% of Croatians who have already been vaccinated," he said.

He said that Croatia had less restrictive anti-epidemic rules than some other countries and that the education system, transport, economy, production and social life had been functioning.

People in Croatia have been able to go to the cinema, theatre, to museums and restaurants, he noted, adding that that was why he considered the emotionalism regarding freedoms unserious.

I don't see reason for protests in Croatia

Even though mass protests are taking place across Europe, including France, Slovenia and Greece, Plenković said that he did not see any reason for protests in Croatia.

"The regime here has not been strict... people have been able to go to school, travel by bus, train, go to the cinema, theatre... What is missing? Discos? I think we can survive without discos for one season, hopefully the last one," he said, noting that the topic had been exaggerated as there was no reason for criticism about restriction of freedoms in Croatia

Noting that he was not imposing his opinion on anyone, Plenković said that as a responsible prime minister, trusting science, he wanted to repeat that COVID-19 was spread easily, that more than 8,300 Croatians had died of it and that the costs related to the disease amounted to HRK 36 billion.

For more on Croatia, CLICK HERE.