Montenegrin judges will face a big test in the coming period, as the former leaders of the third branch of government, Vesna Medenica and Blažo Jovanić, as well as other judges, former heads of state bodies, businessmen and customs officers, who were arrested in the previous period, will be on the dock.
However, we still do not have an answer to many cases from previous years.
The new Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT), headed by Vladimir Novović, launched numerous investigations in eight months, but also brought indictments against the former leaders of the Montenegrin judiciary, Vesna Medenica and Blaž Jovanić.
However, the judiciary still has no answer to numerous cases in which high corruption is suspected and which have burdened society for years, claims Dejan Milovac from the Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector (MANS).
"We see cases like Petar Ivanović, who was stripped of his immunity almost a year ago or more than a year ago, without the prosecution and the judiciary doing anything concrete to bring the case, specifically his, to a conclusion. And the case of Slavoljub Stijepović, who was first cleared of suspicion, then again brought back into focus for money laundering and illegal influence on voters," Milovac said.
Milovac claims that the accusations against the former president of the Supreme Court, Vesna Medenica, that she influenced the judges to conclude certain cases in favor of the companies "Fab Live" and "Cijevna Commerce", regardless of the factual situation, indicate that other cases that ended ingloriously should be reviewed. .
"We cannot know whether the length of that procedure and their final result was actually ignorance or corruption," Milovac said.
Among those proceedings, Milovac singles out the case against the former mayor of Podgorica, Miomir Mugoša, who was acquitted by the first-instance verdict of having damaged the city budget by 6,7 million euros in the Customs case.
In MANS, they suspect that in previous years there was a synchronization between the prosecution and the judiciary that some big cases ended by rejecting them despite the large amount of evidence, and they don't see any progress even today. Years ago, as a rule, the only disciplinary proceedings against judges and prosecutors were for failure to report property records, while prosecutors were always given a five because of the quality of their work.
"We have seen from examples of organized crime such as Karić and Šarić and MANS often mentions them as reference examples that literally no one was held accountable for obvious mistakes, both on the side of the prosecution that prepared an indictment that was not sustainable and on the side of the judiciary that accepted such indictment and tried people based on a previously failed process," Milovac said.
That's why Milovac says that expectations from the Prosecutor's Council headed by Maja Jovanović were high, but...
"It does not give us the right to believe that anything more serious is happening there, that is, we still do not have a clear message that prosecutors who do not do their job well will actually be held accountable for it," said Milovac.
In the meantime, the number of cases older than three years before the court is constantly increasing. Over the past ten months, the number of red envelopes has increased by more than 1.600.
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