The ineffective investigation into the murder of the founder and editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Dan" Duško Jovanović resulted in an unsolved crime 20 years after it was committed, so today only the issue of responsibility and lawsuits for just satisfaction remain, announced the Association of Professional Journalists of Montenegro (DPNCG).
"The investigation of this crime is a textbook example of ineffectiveness. In the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of Montenegro, as evidence that an investigation was ineffective, it is stated that it did not meet the standards of urgency, thoroughness and independence, and did not lead to identification and punishment." , stated the General Secretary of the DPNCG Mila Radulović.
The absence of determining the motive and the perpetrators of the crime, as she said, is a clear sign that there was no political will for it to be investigated, "and the transfer of responsibility from police officials of that time to prosecutors and vice versa is completely irrelevant today because there is no material evidence".
"After this crime, serious attacks on journalists in Montenegro who were investigating the connections between organized crime and parts of the former government moved in an upward direction. And they, like the most serious among them - murder, are still unsolved today because the competent prosecutors professionally avoided they are doing their job," adds Radulović.
That is why, he points out, the responsibility for crimes against journalists lies primarily with them, "but unfortunately, the most famous are retired, passed away or there is no evidence of their obstructions."
She said that justice should be sought before the court. In this case, he reminds, it is the Constitutional Court, because the European Court of Human Rights found that a constitutional appeal in Montenegro is an effective legal remedy.
"The state has already lost one - in the case of our colleague Tufik Softić, where the Constitutional Court established a violation of the right to life due to the failure to conduct an effective investigation," writes Radulović.
She said that the DPNCG also welcomes the efforts of the Commission for Monitoring Investigations of Attacks on Journalists to achieve progress in the investigation through a reward or amnesty for possible relevant witnesses, "but current trends do not inspire optimism that anything will change."
"This can also be seen from the recycled answers of the Prosecutor's Office, which they sent to all the media regarding inquiries about the progress of the investigation. The same answer was received by our association, which in the coming days will publish a text in which it maps the responsibility for the extrajudicial killing and proposes measures ('solution journalism' )", states Radulović.
"The journalists' interlocutors are former high-ranking officials, members of the Jovanović family, the Supreme State Prosecutor, civil activists and it is implemented through a project supported by the Delegation of the European Union in Montenegro, whose goal is to protect journalists," the announcement concludes.
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