Bosnia Releases Another Genocide Convict
The Bosnian State Court has ordered the immediate release from prison of Zeljko Ivanovic, a former Bosnian Serb special police member, who was sentenced to 24 years in prison for assisting the Srebrenica genocide.
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The Bosnian Court said on Friday, that the decision to release Ivanovic was made after the Bosnian Constitutional Court quashed the final verdict against him because of the wrong application of the criminal code.
Ivanovic, former member of the Sekovici unit of the Bosnian Serb Special police, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for taking part in the killing of about 1,000 Bosniaks on July 13, 1995 in the Kravica warehouse near Bratunac.
The Bosnian State Court sentenced him according to the Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina which was adopted in 2003.
In its decision, the Constitutional Court said that the verdict against Ivanovic was quashed because the wrong criminal code was used, and Ivanovic should have been tried under the law which was in use at the time of his crime, which is the Criminal Code of the former Yugoslavia.
The Bosnian State Court had said in a statement that they had to release Ivanovic from prison, since the verdict which sentenced him to long-term imprisonment was quashed.
Over 15 war crime convicts have been released by Bosnia since the summer of last year, after the European Court of Human Rights decided in one case involving two convicts – Goran Damjanovic and Aduladhim Maktouf – that the Bosnian State Court wrongly used the 2003 criminal code, instead of the former Yugoslav code in some of its cases.
There are still around 20 Bosnian war crime convicts who have appealed their verdicts because of the wrong use of the criminal code to the Bosnian Constitutional code.
