By not making a decision on the registration of Hague verdicts, the Ministry of Justice of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) directly protects convicted war criminals. Mirjana Marinkovic-Lepic, the representative of Nasa stranka (Our Party) in the Parliamentary Assembly (PA) of BiH, claims that.
Marinkovic-Lepic sent a question to the Ministry of Justice, asking for an answer as to why this problem was not acted upon.
According to her, it has been pointed out for years to the Ministry of Justice of BiH on the importance of registering the verdicts of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Courts from The Hague. Victims’ associations, as well as the Hague prosecutors such as Serge Brammertz regularly warned of this.
Criminals are equal to other citizens
As deputy Marinkovic-Lepic said, blocking the registration of final verdicts in the BiH legal system further compromises the persecution of persons named in those verdicts, and persons convicted of war crimes have been put on an equal position with other BiH citizens and may even be candidates at the elections.
Following her claims, journalists looked for an answer from the BiH Ministry of Justice, where they stated they initiated activities in the process of obtaining, recording, and storing data on criminal convictions of BiH citizens, handed down by the ICTY.
Ministry: There is a legal vacuum, there are two reasons
“On several occasions, talks were held with representatives of the Office of the European Union (EU) Special Representative in BiH regarding the resolution of this issue, where it was also determined that there is a legal vacuum regarding the procedure for retrieving data from ICTY International Criminal Court (ICC) judgments for registration in BiH criminal records (records are kept by the competent authorities in the place of birth). That is, there is currently a legal vacuum to address this issue, which is caused by two things, ” the ministry said.
As they explained, the first is that the ICTY Rules of Procedure do not define this issue of exchanging verdicts with the country of origin of convicts, and the second is that the relevant law in BiH does not define who should take action to obtain information from final ICTY/ICC verdicts in order to be entered in the criminal record.
“In order to resolve this issue, the Ministry of Justice of BiH prepared the Information with proposed conclusions and submitted it to the Council of Ministers of BiH, whose conclusion instructed this ministry to propose with the competent institutions of BiH, entities, and Brcko District the correct definition of rights and obligations in resolving this issue and to prepare the text of the agreement/memorandum on the issues of handing over and taking over the ICTY verdicts. The formed Working Group held several meetings and prepared a proposal for the memorandum, ” the ministry noted.
