New HJPC Guidelines Provide Better Practices for Publicizing Information
This post is also available in: Bosnian
“The Guidelines for Publicizing Court and Prosecutorial Decisions on Official Internet Pages” have been accepted by 26 judicial institutions. The guidelines were created last year by a HJPC working group.
The guidelines recommend that indictments or adequate informative documents related to war crimes, corruption, organized crime, economic crime, as well as other cases of special public interest, be made available on institutional websites. Institutions will determine which information can be publicly shared and at which stage in the proceedings they will be publicized.
Due to a lack of clear provisions as to whether the names of defendants and guilty parties can be made public and whether the public can access indictments and verdicts, institutions have employed varying practices.
“We applied a more restrictive approach before, so we provided the initials of defendants and guilty parties when publicizing first instance verdicts, but we now mention their full names,” says Edina Hairlahovic of the Cantonal Court in Bihac.
Harmonizing practices with regards to publicizing court information is useful for journalists as well. Mirsad Arnautovic, a journalist with Brcko Radio, says that the Brzko Prosecution was among the first legal institutions to end the practice of anonymizing the names of people involved in cases.
“Applying the new rulebook and abolishing anonymity measures has made our work easier. The information we request from the prosecution is complete. It often contains the concrete names and last names of the persons being processed and those who’ve had indictments confirmed against them. Also, after the verdicts are handed down first and last names are published, which makes our work much easier,” says Arnautovic.
Some courts and prosecutions have not adopted the guidelines, but state that their method of publicizing information doesn’t differ much from the working group’s recommendations.
“We haven’t officially accepted the guidelines, but we have our communication strategy, which overall matches the recommendations contained in the guidelines,” said Ilhana Jamak, the spokesperson of the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The HJPC working group was formed with the aim of preparing instructions on how to publicize information. This occurred after certain judicial institutions began to implement anonymity measures, such as only providing the initials of defendants and convicts, and the names of towns, municipalities and facilities.
By adopting the new guidelines, courts and prosecutions will, for the first time ever, apply harmonized practices for publicizing information. However, some institutions say that they will not be able to fully implement the working group’s guidelines due to their lack of human and other resources.
“The prosecution does not have sufficient human resources and other capacities needed for publishing integral indictments on its official website, but, when we receive requests for access to information of interest to the public, we forward dispositive parts of confirmed indictments,” explains Admir Arnautovic of the Tuzla prosecution.
The district prosecution in Trebinje faces a similar problem. Srdjan Vukanovic says his institution doesn’t have a spokesperson, and he took on that role in his capacity as secretary. As a result he’s unable to send or upload all of their information onto their website.
The justice system’s refusal to provide information began with the Bosnian state prosecution’s decision to remove all indictments from their website in 2010. As of February 2012, it’s been impossible to access indictments, even by special request. The Bosnian state prosecution said it couldn’t offer any comment as to whether they would accept the new HJPC guidelines and whether the public would be able to access their indictments.
