Bosnia Struggles With War Crimes Investigation Backlog

The High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, which is responsible for supervising the Bosnian justice system, said that from July 2012 until October this year, the number of open investigations for war crimes against known suspects was reduced from 1,320 to 1,286.

The country’s national strategy for prosecuting war crimes envisages that all cases should be completed within 15 years, and the most complex cases by the end of the next year.

In an attempt to achieve this, the number of prosecutors working on war crimes cases in the Bosnian prosecution was doubled since the end of last year, and the number of prosecutors in other offices was also increased.

But the fall of just two per cent in the number of investigations indicates that the judicial authorities could have a tough task to achieve their goal of dealing with crimes committed during the 1992-95 war within the specified timeframe.

At the State Prosecution Office, there was even a significant increase in the number of investigations against known suspects, from 658 in July 2012 to 770 in September this year.

But prosecution spokesperson Boris Grubesic said that the increase in prosecutors inevitably boosted the number of cases that were being worked on.

He said that some cases, which previously only consisted of a report, had been moved into the investigation stage, which also contributed to the rise, while new reports on war crimes committed during the conflict had also arrived in the last two years.

“The increase in the number of these cases is a logical sequence of events,” Grubesic insisted.

According to the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, there are also 944 open investigations in cases in which the suspects have not yet been identified. These could also potentially add to the backlog in the future.

The president of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, Milorad Novkovic, said earlier this year that more needed to be done to ensure that all cases were completed by 2015.

“Some progress has been made, but we need extra efforts to meet the deadlines,” Novkovic said.