After several years of appeals by the victims’ association and the OSCE mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the State Prosecutor’s Office published data on the work in cases involving more than 800 persons with the ‘A’ mark.
The statement of the Prosecutor’s Office states that from 2004 to 2022, a total of 814 cases submitted by the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) were recorded. The Prosecutor’s Office of BiH states that the decision to suspend the investigation was made for more than 250 cases marked ‘A’, as the ICTY designated cases for which they believed there was sufficient evidence for a well-founded suspicion that a person had committed serious violations of international humanitarian law.
President of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide, Murat Tahirovic, said in an interview that this is the first time that the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH has come out with specific information about the ‘A’ list and with specific numbers where each case is located.
Applying international standards, as stated on the ICTY website, the staff of the Prosecutor’s Office reviewed more than 1,400 case files related to nearly 5,000 suspects and gave an opinion on whether sufficient evidence was collected for further proceedings in these cases.
A positive opinion was given for the criminal prosecution of 848 persons. In a statement, the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH explained that by reviewing their own records and exchanging data with the International Mechanism for Criminal Courts (IMCS), the successor of the Tribunal, as well as checks with the Entity and Brcko District Prosecutor’s Offices, they determined that individual persons with the designation ‘A’ were registered and assigned such designations several times, so the final number is 814.
According to the tabular representation of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH on persons with the ‘A’ designation, 79 persons have been sentenced to date. Of these, there are 63 convictions and 16 acquittals.
The Prosecutor’s Office of BiH resolved the status of 118 persons by suspending the investigation, in the case of 50 persons the status was resolved by not conducting the investigation.
In conclusion to date, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that there are 62 cases with 150 persons marked ‘A’ in their work, which have priority in handling, in accordance with the provisions of the Revised State Strategy for Work on War Crimes Cases and Annex B, as well as the Obligatory Instructions of the Chief Prosecutor of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH.
The Prosecutor’s Office also published a tabular representation of the transfer of proceedings for ‘A’ persons from the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH to the Entity Prosecutor’s Office and the Brcko District Prosecutor’s Office, according to which 342 persons are involved.
According to the table, 155 persons were sentenced with the final judgment. There are 108 convictions, of which one was handed down to Croatia, one was dropped by the Prosecution from the indictment in the repeated proceedings, and one was a negative verdict. There are 44 acquittals, and one person is being reviewed.
Nine people, according to both tables, died before being processed. Tahirovic believes that the worrying number is that in relation to more than 300 persons, the investigation has been suspended or has not even been carried out.
”This is a large number compared to 814 people. If we consider that for 307 persons the investigation was suspended or not even carried out, that is about 40 percent of the total number from the ‘A’ list, which is somewhat worrying, and we will have to talk with the representatives of the Residual Mechanism, but also with the people in the Prosecutor’s Office, to see what are the reasons why the investigation has been suspended for such a large number of persons from the ‘A’ list,” Tahirovic states.
