Bosnia Running Out of Courtrooms for War Crimes Trials
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State court president Meddzida Kreso said on Monday that the numbers of prosecutors working on war crimes cases had been systematically increasing as the country seeks to tackle its huge backlog of cases, putting extra strain on limited courtroom space.
We can now follow that work, but if there are a large number of new charges, we will not be able to do that with this capacity, said Kreso.
The president of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, Milorad Novkovic, said meanwhile that five more prosecutors would be appointed next month to work on war crimes cases only, while another ten prosecutors will be appointed to the entity-level prosecution to work on war crimes.
The appointments come not long after the state prosecutors office hired 12 more prosecutors in November.
We have seen that there is a problem with the [lack of] courtrooms. It will now be our number one priority to solve this problem, in order to work more intensively, said Novkovic.
The state court has eight courtrooms, six of which are used for war crimes cases, as well as for other criminal cases.
Bosnia and Herzegovina still has a backlog of around 1,000 unprosecuted war crimes cases, more than half of which are on the state level.
