The committee and the parliamentary Council for the Civilian Supervision of Security Services on Tuesday held a closed session, adopting conclusions at the proposal of a five-member fact-finding commission that had carried out an investigation into complaints by the five reporters about having been unlawfully monitored by POA.
Committee chairman Ivan Jarnjak told reporters after the session that four conclusions had been adopted.
One of the conclusions says that a report entitled "A Media and Intelligence Campaign Aimed at Discrediting Croatia" was Turek's idea and that it was compiled during a POA operation.
During the operation, a record was made of Gordan Malic, a journalist with the Globus weekly, in compliance with the Security Services Act and POA's Rules of Procedure. The committee found that Malic was not the direct target of data gathering which restricted his human rights.
In 2004, POA did not collect data about reporters, and of the five reporters who lodged complaints, Malic was the only one who was registered due to his contacts with persons of interest to security, according to the conclusions.
Jarnjak declined to reveal the names of those persons, saying that the information was classified.
The committee also concluded that there were grounds for suspicion that the five reporters' human rights and freedoms, guaranteed by the Constitution, were violated, because the intelligence gathered by POA did not indicate that the reporters had been involved in operations threatening national security, which was what Turek wrote in the report.
According to the final conclusion, the committee decided to transfer the entire case to the Public Prosecutor.
All but two committee members who abstained, voted in favour of the conclusions.