On Friday, the basic court in Podgorica rejected the lawsuit filed by former ambassador Dušanka Jeknić against former prime minister Zdravko Krivokapić and former foreign minister Đorđe Radulović, for suffering mental pain due to the violation of personal rights.
Her legal representative, lawyer Zoran Piperović, confirmed this to "Vijesta", announcing an appeal against the first-instance verdict.
With the lawsuit, Jeknić demanded that Krivokapić and Radulović undertake to pay her 50.000 euros due to the violation of her rights.
Commenting on the first-instance decision, Piperović said that "he has not seen a similar scalarity".
"Of course, there is no chance that the verdict will remain on appeal, because even in the explanation, a certain space was given to the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) and Milo Đukanović, who were not mentioned in any of the submissions, and which are reflected in the verdict. It even says that Đukanović a political opponent of the defendants," said Piperović.
He added that "a person should spend his whole life in the judiciary, and wait to read a similar verdict".
"I wanted to publish her entire explanation in a daily newspaper, but my landlord did not allow me to do so... Now I see that the chance of winning this dispute in the first-instance proceedings was zero. There is no chance that, after the appeal, the verdict will stand. More one curiosity is that for the first time it happens that the attorney of the first class defendant (Krivokapić), after receiving the verdict, insults the plaintiff on a portal and mentions how much the costs of the procedure will have to pay. More than 50 colleagues, mainly younger ones, called me and asked if it was possible that a colleague does that...", said Piperović.
The verdict was handed down by judge Katarina Peković.
Jeknić sued the former state officials because, as Piperović said earlier, they repeatedly went public with evaluations in which they "recklessly defamed" her because of the way in which, according to them, she performed her duties as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates (UAE ).
She took up that position in July 2019, and was recalled at the end of February 2021, at the proposal of the then Government.
At the same time, the government recalled seven more ambassadors - Vera Kuliš, Sanja Vlahović, Miodrag Vlahović, Tarzan Milošević, Darko Pajović, Obrad Miš Stanišić and Budimir Šegrt.
The government demanded their impeachment claiming that the reasons for that political agitation were inappropriate for a diplomatic function and it suspected that some of them served the private or interests of various groups or individuals.
Jeknić is currently employed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which, at the request of the Administrative Inspection, returned her to full employment, assigning her to the General Directorate for Multilateral and International Legal Affairs.
She has been employed at MFA since 2003.
She was one of the defendants in the "tobacco affair" in Italy, but the court in Bari acquitted her, along with other Montenegrin citizens, of smuggling charges in early 2019.
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