Bosnian Judiciary Under Pressure After Critical European Report

Experts told BIRN that action must be taken after legal expert Reinhard Priebe’s highly critical report for the European Commission said that Bosnia and Herzegovina must reform its dysfunctional justice system and reduce political pressures on the judiciary.

State judge Branko Peric argued that the current members of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, Bosnia’s judicial overseer, should be replaced in order “to bring in other people who will restore citizens’ confidence in that institution through their actions, moral integrity and professionalism”.

“I am not very optimistic, but something will have to be changed. These are tasks for the political sphere,” Peric said.

The Priebe report, published on Thursday, said that the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council “is often perceived by citizens and even by members of the judicial community as a centre of unaccountable power in the hands of persons serving the interests of a network of political patronage and influence”.

A positive rule-of-law assessment from the European Commission is crucial to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s hopes of progressing towards EU membership.

But Peric suggested that the situation was even worse than the report claims.

“That is not just about corruption, but the complete ineffectiveness of the system and prosecution policy, because the judiciary today is dealing with ‘petty’ crimes instead of a grave,” he said.

Miodrag Stojanovic, a lawyer with considerable experience in war-crimes cases, said that the Priebe report’s main findings were to be expected, but expressed disappointment that it did not make specific recommendations for reform.

“I expected them to give some concrete proposals for overcoming the situation we are in now,” Stojanovic said.

The chief of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, Milan Tegeltija, claimed that politicians, intelligence agents and the media were responsible for the report’s negative conclusions.

“Although it is generally very critical of the rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina and even the judiciary, I would say that, considering the political-parallel intelligence service-media campaign that has been conducted recently, it is not that bad for the judiciary as it might have been, given the resources and efforts invested in making judiciary look really bad,” Tegeltija wrote on Facebook.

He said that Priebe, although trying to be objective, could not “totally neglect the forced, political, channelled media pressure”.

Goran Nezirovic, a member of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, said however that it was “crucial that all relevant domestic actors immediately commit to honestly implementing the recommendations and reform measures and improving the justice situation”.