Indictments and War-Crimes Verdicts Can Be Online
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A working group of the HJPC prepared “Guidelines for publishing court and prosecutorial decisions on official Internet pages” and determined that all confirmed indictments and verdicts could be published.
This document recommends that indictments or appropriate information related to war crimes, corruption, organised and economic crime, crimes against official duties, as well as other cases that are of special public interest, should be available on Internet pages.
“The content that is published should contain data about the prosecution, which filed the indictment, as well as personal data about the indictees, including the following: first and last name, year and place of birth, factual and legal description of the crime without the names of injured parties and witnesses…” the Guidelines indicate.
The HJPC Working Group was established after some of the judicial institutions began implementing anonymisation measures – mentioning initials instead of first and last names of indictees and convicts, names of towns, municipalities and facilities. The goal of the HJPC Working Group was to prepare guidelines for harmonizing the practices related to the publishing of documents.
Back in 2010 the Prosecution of BiH removed indictments from its Internet page. As of February 2012 it has not even been possible to obtain them at special request. Right before that the Court of BiH decided to anonymise the documents as per a proposal by the Agency for Protection of Personal Data.
The media, associations of victims and NGO sector condemned the anonymisation, requesting that information from war crimes trials be available. After that the HJPC rendered a decision saying that anonymisation was not obligatory.
The HJPC Working Group concluded that verdicts were public and that they should be published without restrictions related to the nature and gravity of crimes. The Guidelines also indicate which personal data will not be considered public.
“Unique personal identification numbers, personal identification card numbers, passport and driver’s licence numbers and numbers of other personal documents, as well as special categories of data prescribed under the Law on Protection of Personal Data, will not be published in any of the court decisions uploaded on web pages,” the Guidelines indicate.
Besides that, a recommendation was made “not to remove indictments and court decisions in cases related to crimes against humanity and values protected under the international laws from the Internet pages of relevant judicial institutions.”
According to this document, each institution will adopt a special rulebook, containing a detailed description of the procedure for the processing of prosecutorial and court documents on the Internet, no later than 90 days following the adoption of these Guidelines.
