Bosnia Asked to Speed up and Improve War Crime Processing
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Milorad Novković, President of the Supervisory Body for Overseeing the Implementation of the National War Crimes Strategy said that in the upcoming period the Bosnian Prosecution should “prosecute more complex cases of war crimes more efficiently”.
“The Supervisory Body especially stresses the need to take immediate action towards processing the more complex war crime cases with greater efficiency. In particular, the Prosecutors Office of BiH is called on to move forward in processing cases under category II – i.e. cases handed over from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,“ said Novkovic.
The Conference heard that there are more than 1,200 cases of reported war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina where the identity of the alleged perpetrator is known, and which remain to be investigated and tried as well as several thousand more crimes where the suspect is still unidentified.
In wishing to hasten the processing of war crimes cases throughout BiH and speed up the implementation of the National War Crimes Strategy, the EU agreed in December 2012 to provide 14.876 million euro of budgetary support for prosecutor offices and courts over a five-year period.
This IPA budgetary support formally commenced in February this year and in the subsequent months, 142 staff were recruited for 16 prosecutor offices, 6 courts and the Office of Criminal Defence within the Ministry of Justice of BiH.
“We believe that bringing justice and processing of war crimes cases is crucial for reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the whole region. The EU supports these efforts by making it an important topic of the Structured Dialogue on Justice, and through extraordinary IPA budgetary support.
While we note that there has been a slight reduction in the number of war crimes cases, what matters too is the quality of the investigation and adjudication of war crimes,” said Renzo Daviddi, Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to BiH.
The Supervisory Body for Overseeing the Implementation of the National War Crimes Strategy (Supervisory Body) and the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the EU Special Representative jointly organised a Conference on War Crimes Processing on Friday in Sarajevo.
