Laković: If the prosecution does not urgently address the "black threes" case, I will seek justice before international institutions

Professor and former advisor to the President of Montenegro Vojo Laković addressed and sent a public protest to the Prosecutorial Council of Montenegro due to, as he states, the long-standing failure of the Supreme State Prosecutor's Office (SPO) and the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SPO) to act in cases that, according to his claims, indicate serious systemic anomalies, selective justice and institutional passivity.

In his address to members of the Prosecutorial Council, Laković points out that he has exhausted all domestic legal mechanisms in trying to point out shortcomings in the work of the prosecutorial organization, but that instead of a response, he has encountered a "wall of silence and ignoring the facts."

He particularly criticizes, as he states, the lack of control over the work of the SDT, claiming that this institution has turned into a closed system that selectively chooses cases, while the most serious crimes, especially those that indicate a possible connection between crime and parts of the state apparatus, go unprocessed for years.

Laković believes that the Prosecutorial Council bears direct responsibility for the lack of effective mechanisms for holding prosecutors accountable for failure to act, which, in his words, "encourages inefficiency and protects those who obstruct justice."

Central to his address is a reminder of the brutal physical attack he survived several years ago, which Laković publicly qualifies as an act of "state terrorism" carried out by the so-called "black threes".

According to his previous statements, the attack had the characteristics of organized violence, and to this day, as he claims, neither the direct perpetrators nor any orderers have been prosecuted. Laković cites the lack of a judicial epilogue to that case as one of the key pieces of evidence that certain segments of the prosecution are still operating under the influence of the structures that, as he says, established such methods of violence.

"The silence of institutions in the face of crime is not neutrality, it is complicity," says Laković.

In the conclusion of his open address, Laković announced that, due to the complete loss of confidence in the independence and willingness of the Montenegrin prosecution to face its own shortcomings, he decided to stop waiting for internal reforms, which, he said, are only declaratively announced.

"If you do not urgently and without delay take concrete steps to investigate my allegations and prosecute those responsible, I will be forced to seek protection and justice from international institutions. The focus of my future work will be the internationalization of the issue of state terrorism that I survived, while informing relevant international bodies in detail about the complicity of the prosecutorial organization through conscious inaction. Justice must not be selective, and the silence of institutions in the face of crime is complicity," concludes Professor Laković.