Bosnian Croat Fighter’s War Rape Sentence Reduced

The Bosnian court’s appeals chamber on Thursday resentenced Kovac, the former commander of the military police of the Bosnian Croat Vitez Brigade, using the more lenient criminal code of the former Yugoslavia, reducing his jail term to eight years.

During the armed conflict between the Bosnian Army and the Croatian Defence Council in April and May 1993, Kovac was found to have unlawfully imprisoned people and coerced them into forced labour.

He was also found to have approved illegal arrests and to have joined his subordinate military officers in unlawfully detaining Bosniak civilians in the Workers’ University, Cinema Hall and the Cultural Centre in Vitez.

“The detained civilians were kept under guard in inhumane conditions and with the approval of the convicted Kovac, they were taken to carry out forced labour at [front-line] locations such as Kratine, Krcevine and Pirici, where they were exposed to mortal danger. He also was found guilty of raping one civilian at the Culture Centre [in Vitez],” the verdict said.

Kovac was originally sentenced in 2010 to nine years in prison. But the constitutional court quashed this verdict, ruling that he should have been sentenced under the more lenient criminal code of the former Yugoslavia, which was in force at the time that the crimes were committed, not under the harsher 2003 Bosnian criminal code.

The constitutional court made the decision after the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that two other convicts’ rights had been violated by the incorrect use of the harsher criminal code.

A total of 18 war crimes verdicts have been quashed by the Bosnian court as a result of the ruling so far.

According to his lawyer, Kovac has already served about seven years of his sentence.