Release of Convicts not Ordered by Constitutional Court
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In an announcement issued on the occasion of, as she said, wrong interpretations of Constitutional Court’s decisions, she says that the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina should have solved these issues in accordance with the law.
Galic rejected the allegations that the Constitutional Court forced the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina to apply the Criminal Code from 2003.
“According to data contained in the European Court’s ruling, appellate chambers of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina have rendered 21 decisions. In five cases they applied the Criminal Code of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, SFRJ, from 1976, while the Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2003 was applied in 16 cases,” the President of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina says.
In July this year the European Court for Human Rights accepted appeals filed by Abduladhim Maktouf and Goran Damjanovic and determined that the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina wrongly applied the Criminal Code from 2003.
A few months after the mentioned decision the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina accepted appeals filed by ten war-crimes convicts, quashing the second instance verdicts under which they were sentenced to between 14 and 33 years in prison. After that the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina released those convicts to liberty.
“In those concrete cases the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina consistently applied the standards from the European Court’s ruling in the case of Maktouf and Damjanovic concerning the application of the European Convention, which contains a ban on the retroactive application of criminal codes without any exceptions and an obligation to apply more benign criminal code in all cases irrespective of the type and gravity of crimes in question,” Galic said.
As she explained, the Constitutional Court determined that the State Court’s verdicts violated only the appellants’ rights related to the application of the law, because there is a real possibility that the retroactive application of the Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2003 was to the detriment of the convicts in terms of the pronounced sentences.
On Monday, November 18 the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina informed the public that it had released ten convicts from prison on the basis of the Constitutional Court’s decision.
