The Croatian Journalists Association (HND) and Croatian Journalists Union (SNH) said on Thursday that an injunction ordering news website H-Alter to stop publishing articles about the head of Zagreb's Child and Youth Protection Centre, Gordana Buljan-Flander, was "an attempt at censorship and media silencing."

After the nonprofit portal H-alter in the past few weeks ran a series of articles by reporter Jelena Jindra “problematising the work of the Zagreb centre” and its head Buljan-Flander, Zagreb Municipal Court judge Andrija Krivak issued an injunction ordering H-alter to stop publishing articles about Buljan-Flander.

“The HND and SNH believe this is a dangerous attempt at censorship and silencing of the media, and call on all Croatian media, journalists and editors to oppose this type of pressure and, in a show of solidarity with Jindra and H-alter, carry her investigative series ‘System for Protection or Abuse of Children?”, thus showing that we cannot be silenced,” HND president Hrvoje Zovak and SNH president Maja Sever said in a statement.

They noted that the court gave an assessment of the journalist’s investigative work without talking to her or the portal’s publisher, and that according to accounts by other reporters Buljan-Flander and her associates had missed a number of opportunities to present their view of what Jindra describes as the “controversial doctrine” of so-called parental alienation, which some experts cited by Jindra say is used as a pretext to take away child custody from women who are victims of violence.