Serbia Uses 'Amber Alert' for First Time After Girl Disappears

The Serbian version of Amber Alert, introduced in the country last year, was activated on Tuesday for the first time after a two-year-old girl disappeared in the town of Bor.

The “Pronadji me” [Find me] system, the Serbian version of the Amber Alert, a system of dissemination and publication of information of cases of missing children, was activated on Tuesday for the first time in Serbia after a two-year-old girl went missing in the town of Bor.

TV and radio stations interrupted their programs to publish a notice on the missing girl and information on the time and place of her disappearance, her clothes and age. Citizens also received SMSs with the notice, but not at the same time, over intervals of several hours. There were also notices on the information tables on highways across the country.

Igor Juric, president of the Center for Missing and Abused Children, told TV Prva that the Ministry of Interior was working to improve the system, but that operators can send up to 50,000 SMS messages in one minute.

“In some future period, this system will not be based on SMS messages but on some other types of information, where a mobile operator will not be needed to inform citizens about the disappearance of a child,” Juric said.

Serbia’s Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media, REM, adopted a regulation in September 2023 that obliged media to publish notifications about the disappearance of a child without delay and to broadcast the messages regularly over the next 48 hours. Notifications must be broadcast every 30 minutes for the first eight hours and every 50 minutes thereafter.

In July 2023, the government adopted a conclusion introducing the “Pronadji me” system.

Earlier, in July 2021, the Centre for Missing and Abused Children launched an initiative to introduce a special public notification system in cases of missing children.

The Amber Alert system is a mechanism that officially functions in the US, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Malta, Ireland, Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Created in the US in 1996, it was named after Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old girl from Texas who was kidnapped and then murdered.

At the end of February, Bosnia and Herzegovina voted to implement Amber Alerts after several earlier attempts failed. According to the decision, the country has until the end of April to implement the system.