For almost a year now, the international arrest warrant for Milomir Savcic, accused of genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995, has not been published on the INTERPOL website, as is the case with other persons wanted by the authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). An international arrest warrant was issued in August 2021.
The Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies of BiH, ie the INTERPOL Office in Sarajevo confirmed for Radio Free Europe (RFE) that all conditions for issuing an international arrest warrant have been met and that its public announcement has been required, but to date, this has not been done. They state that they do not know why this is so because they have not received a response from the General Secretariat to INTERPOL in Lyon.
Savcic has been inaccessible to the BiH authorities since August 2021, when he was ordered to be detained, because he was ordered into custody until the end of the trial due to “media appearances and communicating with the media about the facts of the case against him before this court.” Savcic’s trial began in June 2020.
He is one of 30 percent of war crimes prosecution cases in which the indictee is unavailable, which is one of the factors in the slow resolution of cases in BiH courts.
Of the 253 cases pending in BiH courts in 2021, 77 relate to a lack of efficiency in regional cooperation, the OSCE Mission to BiH told.
“It is affected by the fact that the accused or suspect is not available, but also that evidence cannot be gathered, either through international legal assistance mechanisms or through regional cooperation mechanisms,” explained Nedzad Smailagic, an OSCE legal adviser.
He assessed that the key is the implementation and respect for the agreements concerning regional cooperation.
But, the resolution of the case is not only affected by theinaccessibility of the accused.
Since 2004, when the Prosecutor’s Office of the Hague Tribunal returned cases to the BiH judiciary, ie a list of 848 persons related to the commission of war crimes, the domestic judiciary has so far completed the proceedings for 560 persons.
War crimes cases are prosecuted in BiH at the state, entity, and cantonal levels, as well as in the Brcko District Court. These are a total of 18 judicial institutions, six district courts in the Republika Srpska (RS) entity, ten cantonal courts in the Federation of BiH (FBiH), one court in Brcko, and the BiH state court.
Any of the cases returned to BiH by the Hague Tribunal can be processed in these courts.
It is also important to note the worrying fact that although the conviction rate in the RS courts remained the same as in previous years, the rate fell from 69 percent (2019) to 43 percent in the Court of BiH and from 79 percent (2019) to 50 percent in FBiH, RSE writes.
E.Dz.
