Bearing in mind the importance of the election of the Supreme State Prosecutor (SVP) for the future of the country, MPs should especially look at the attitude of the candidates towards the prosecution of war crimes as a test of their readiness to prosecute the top of the former government, announced today from the non-governmental organization Action for Human Rights (HRA).
The NGO said that on Saturday, January 27, the Parliament of Montenegro will decide on the election of the Supreme State Prosecutor from three candidates: Maja Jovanović, Suzana Mugoš and Milorad Marković.
"It depends on the person who will be the VDT, whether in the next 5 years Montenegro will strategically step towards the rule of law and convince the European Union that it deserves admission to its membership, or not," the HRA press release points out.
From that NGO, they added that they are ready to review old cases of war crimes - Bukovica, Deportation, Kaluđerski Laz, Morinje, which means the examination of command responsibility, which the prosecutor's office has not dealt with due to lack of political will.
"The temporary criteria for chapter 23 – Judiciary and fundamental rights, required from Montenegro that the state prosecution and courts show the capacity, which they have not shown so far, to independently prosecute war crimes in accordance with international humanitarian law and the practice of the Hague Tribunal, and undertake effective measures to address impunity. This is necessary for the state to obtain the final benchmarks for closing this chapter. It also requires dealing with the old, unsuccessfully prosecuted war crimes cases of Deportation, Bukovica and Kaluđerski laz. The judgments in those cases were contrary to international humanitarian law and contained are legal errors, as the European Commission has repeated in several reports," HRA said.
They note that Mauricio Salustro, state prosecutor and international judge, who was hired by the European Commission in 2014 to analyze the work of the state prosecutor's office and the courts of Montenegro, criticized the legal qualifications of the state prosecutor's office and the approach to criminal prosecution in those cases, while he evaluated the court's views as " patently wrong' and 'unprecedented'.
"For this reason, the review of old cases became a strategic issue as early as 2015, when the War Crimes Investigation Strategy stipulated that the SDT should seriously devote itself to checking old cases in order to identify some more suspects, taking into account all models of criminal responsibility and criminal acts '", they state from HRA.
The NGO said that the candidates and the candidate for the post of VDT spoke about the prosecution of war crimes only in front of the parliamentary committee and that in response to questions from deputies.
"No one has given adequate assurances that they will review the old cases, although there are serious doubts that, especially in the Bukovica and Deportation cases, there was a deliberate misqualification, that is, a wrong application of the law, that the lack of political will affected the prosecution of these war crimes and that the verdicts primarily protected the political elite and the narrative that Montenegro did not participate in wars," the announcement reads.
HRA also said that Maja Jovanović formally raised the issue of revising the Strategy for Prosecuting War Crimes.
"However, in the year that she spent in that position, she did not adopt an action plan that would seriously implement the existing strategy, nor is it known that she did an evaluation of what the SDT did in terms of processing war crimes. Jovanović pointed out that the action plan to be an integral part of the new strategy, and that she considers it necessary that the two prosecutors deal only with war crimes cases. She did not talk about the old cases," the statement reads.
HRA states that "Milorad Marković, the candidate for the VDT favored by the parties of the new majority, announced that the old war crimes cases are over for him and that only if the Hague Tribunal - Residual Mechanism submits something new, there will be room for reconsideration".
"Otherwise, he does not intend to review the old cases. This attitude is particularly worrying and it should be considered whether Marković has a conflict of interest in this matter, given that his late father was accused of war crimes and acquitted in one of these case," HRA said.
They also state that Suzana Mugoša, the candidate who has the least chance of being elected, because she was not proposed by the Prosecutor's Council, nor were the representatives of the authorities willing to support her, was the only one who gave a positive statement: "If I am elected, be sure that I will deal with war crimes really deal with it, I think there is room for that, to review old cases from before and to open new ones. Because it seems to me that when you want to work, you get evidence."
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