In 2021, 147 final verdicts were passed in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for corruption offenses, of which only four related to high-level corruption, according to a report by Transparency International in BiH (TIBiH).
Despite BiH being one of the countries with the highest corruption rates in Europe, the judiciary has mainly dealt with small cases and low-ranking officials, while many major scandals have remained unanswered, according to TIBiHCorruption Monitoring.
“All prosecutor’s offices in BiH have filed a total of 235 indictments, of which only 6 or 2.5 percent relate to high-level corruption. One of them concerns former BiH Defense Minister Selmo Cikotic, who is charged with a crime committed more than 10 years ago which additionally indicates untimely and inefficient processing of corruption in BiH, ” the data from TIBiH show.
In BiH, there has been an increase in the number of indictments for corruption compared to 2020. The biggest contribution to that was made by the Federation of BiH (FBiH) prosecutorial system, where the number of indictments increased from 75 in 2020 to 185 last year. On the other hand, TIBiH points out that the number of indictments in the Republika Srpska (RS)prosecutorial system has only slightly increased, but is still far lower than in the five years before the pandemic, while the Brcko District Prosecutor’s Office has reduced the number of corruption charges.
They point out that the District Prosecutor’s Office in IstocnoSarajevo, which filed the last indictment for corruption in 2018, has had disastrous results for years, and the courts have passed only two convictions for corruption in the last seven years.
The largest number of final verdicts for corruption, as many as 68 percent of them ended with a suspended sentence, while only 27.8 percent of verdicts refer to legal sentences. The average prison sentence for corruption in BiH is less than two years, although the law provides for up to 10 years in prison for corruption offenses, Klix.ba writes.
E.Dz.
