Bosnia Starts Overturning War Crimes Convictions

After Europe’s human rights court ruled that some defendants were tried under the wrong criminal code, Bosnia’s constitutional court accepted an appeal from a war crimes convict for his verdict to reconsidered.

Bosnia’s constitutional court on Tuesday accepted the appeal filed by Zoran Damjanovic, who was serving a ten-and-a-half-year sentence for war crimes, on the grounds that his verdict violated the European convention on human rights.

The decision paved the way for more such convictions to be overturned in the future.

In July, the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that two other war criminals’ rights were violated because they should have been tried under the former Yugoslav criminal code instead of the 2003 criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was adopted after they committed their crimes and allowed for potentially higher sentences.

This ruling led Damjanovic – the brother of one of the two men involved in the Strasbourg case – to appeal against his conviction.

“The court has determined that Article 7 of the European Convention was violated. The mentioned article prohibits retroactive application of laws. Also, it contains an obligation to apply a code that is more favourable to the perpetrator,” said the Bosnian constitutional court’s registrar, Zvonko Mijan.

“The case was returned to the Bosnian court in order to render a new decision,” he said.

Following the Strasbourg court’s decision, 11 appeals have been filed by war-crimes convicts to the Bosnian court so far.  

“It can be expected that the constitutional court will render decisions in the remaining similar cases by applying the same principles and standards in the upcoming period,” Mijan said.   

The two men who brought the case to the European rights court were Zoran Damjanovic’s brother Goran and Abduladhim Maktouf.

Goran Damjanovic was sentenced to 11 years in prison for having participated in the beating of a group of captured Bosniaks in Bojnik near Sarajevo. His brother Zoran was jailed for the same crime.

Maktouf was sentenced to five years in prison for having participated in crimes against Croat civilians in the Travnik area in October 1993.