Bosnian Prosecution ‘Failing on Complex War Crime Cases’: OSCE

The head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bruce Berton, told the launch in Sarajevo on Monday of a new report entitled ‘War Crimes Management at the Prosecutor’s Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ that the conviction rate in war crime cases has been falling at an alarming speed and the most complex cases are not being adequately probed.

“The report indicates that the Bosnian state prosecutor’s office does not focus its time and resources solely on investigation and criminal prosecution of the most complex war crime cases,” Berton said.

“The report demonstrates that the prosecutor’s office of Bosnia and Herzegovina prosecutes war crime cases at a very low pace, despite the resources at its disposal. If it continues solving cases at such speed, the Bosnian prosecutor’s office will need ten years to complete all its ongoing war crime cases,” he added.

Berton said the OSCE mission had identified the four key contributing factors – the internal structure of the prosecution’s Special War Crimes Section, the management of prosecutors dealing with the cases, cooperation between relevant institutions and the quality of indictments.

Lars-Gunnar Wigemark, the chief of the European Union delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina, pointed out that the EU has invested significant sums in strengthening human resources in order to speed up the completion of the most complex cases at the state prosecutor’s office.

Wigemark said that despite this, the pace of solving war crime cases has slowed down.

“I call upon the Council of Ministers to adopt the revised [national] strategy for processing war crime cases, whose adoption has been awaited for a year,” he urged.

The revised strategy was approved in February last year by the country’s judicial overseer, the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, but it has not even made it onto the agenda of the Council of Ministers, the executive branch of the state government.

The strategy says that more than 550 unsolved war crimes cases are currently with the state prosecution, in which more than 4,500 known perpetrators are named – and as many cases again against unidentified perpetrators.

Wigemark said that the EU is planning to continue financing the Bosnian judiciary, conditional on the timely and efficient transfer of less complex cases to lower judicial levels, as the revised strategy envisages. Otherwise, he said, funding might be blocked.

Lilian Langford of the OSCE mission pointed out meanwhile that the large number of acquittals was a result of witnesses’ inconsistent statements during investigations and at trials.

Bosnian chief prosecutor Gordana Tadic questioned why the prosecution had not received the report, even though parts of it had appeared on news websites on Sunday night.

Tadic said she had held a series of meetings with the OSCE at which it was said that the prosecutor’s office could not transfer 150 less complex cases to lower judicial levels because the revised strategy has not been adopted yet.

“We want to work on most complex cases, because we want to work in the interest of our citizens and victims. We have good cooperation with representatives of victims. That work should have been recognised. I do not understand the reasons for such a report,” she said.

“Prosecutors cannot be blamed if witnesses decide to change their statements. There is no way we can know whether witnesses will change their statements,” she added.

Tadic also said that indictments were not the only benchmark for assessing the work of prosecutors.

“Unfortunately, you have not highlighted the good things the Bosnian prosecutor’s office has done,” she said.