The President of the Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Suad Arnautovic, said that it was necessary to enable the prosecutor’s offices to monitor the election process in BiH from the very beginning.
At the closing of the two-day conference “Response of the criminal justice sector to threats to the correctness and integrity of elections”, Arnautovic said that election fraud does not happen only on election day or after the polls close, but sometimes before the elections are called.
“If we analyze the cases in the Brcko District of BiH that ended in convictions, actions that were prepared in March and April 2020 were discovered there, which is qualified as preparation of a criminal act,” Arnautovic pointed out.
He announced that a meeting of representatives of the CEC and the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH would be held soon in order to determine the contact person with the prosecutor’s offices at all levels.
The Chief Prosecutor of the Brcko District of BiH, Zekerija Mujkanovic, emphasized that in the last local elections, they opened an investigation against 14 people, eight of whom were sentenced to prison terms, including three deputies in the District Assembly.
He added that the conference concluded that prosecutors’ offices and police agencies needed better co-operation with the CEC in order to report crimes, conduct investigations and provide evidence in open investigations.
