At the end of July 2021, Radovan Kovacevic defended his boss Milorad Dodik’s decision to launch a petition after the former High Representative banned the denial of genocide.
“And so that there would be no dilemma, I am Radovan Kovacevic, I respect all the victims of Srebrenica, but I say clearly: ‘Genocide did not happen in Srebrenica’,” said Dodik’s adviser in the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Presidency at the time in a statement to the media.
Ekrija Ramic from Bratunac decided to react. As someone whose many immediate and extended family members perished during the genocide in Srebrenica and earlier during the war, he says he felt hurt and upset. He adds that he witnessed his father’s shooting in 1992 as a boy.
He reported Kovacevic to the State Prosecutor’s Office.
But a few months later, Kovacevic publicly boasted that the investigation against him would not be carried out. In the decision submitted by the State Prosecutor’s Office, it is stated that there are no grounds for initiating proceedings, that Kovacevic did not violate the Law, and that he was only exercising his right to freedom of opinion and speech.
Since the ban on denying crimes was imposed in July 2021, until the end of 2022, state prosecutors have decided not to conduct a total of 27 investigations for denying genocide, and other war crimes, and glorifying convicted war criminals.
Lejla Gacanica, a legal expert dedicated to researching the prosecution of war crimes, fears that the actions of prosecutors significantly narrow the application of the law and that it is easy to neglect the investigation and prosecution of criminal acts. This can worsen the feeling of security in the long term, as well as trust in the judiciary and the rule of law, she says.
A narrow interpretation
In Kovacevic’s case, the prosecutors concluded that his sentence, that genocide did not take place in Srebrenica, does not contain essential features of inciting national, racial, and religious hatred, discord or intolerance, “because he did not publicly approve, deny, or grossly minimize or try to justify the crime”.
As the applicant, Ramic told the prosecutors that at the time of Kovacevic’s statement, he was out of BiH, he did not talk to anyone about it, but that the statement disturbed him and caused him emotional pain because members of his family died in the genocide.
The Prosecution cites the fact that the applicant is outside BiH and that he did not talk to anyone about it as part of the explanation for not conducting the investigation. Ramic, who works abroad, does not see why it matters if he talked to someone and that he knows that Kovacevic’s statement “offended everyone”, even though he submitted the report as an individual. He appealed the prosecutor’s decision not to conduct an investigation but says he never received an answer.
Analyzing the decisions of the Prosecutor’s Office, Gacanica says that the prosecutors based their assessment of the existence of a criminal offense mainly on the statements of the reported persons, failing to determine whether the acts actually produced incitement to hatred and violence.
According to her, in no case was the context in which the action took place, the goals, as well as the impact it left on a deeply ethnically divided social community where interpretations of the crime replaced court-established facts, observed, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
