Foreign jurists to stay in BiH- but defanged

By The Center for Investigative Reporting

Valentin Inzko, the High Representative (HR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), has taken the middle ground in deciding the fate of international prosecutors and judges working on organized crime and corruption cases but scheduled to leave the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Court and Prosecutor’s Office at the end of the year.

Prominent BiH politicians, some of whom have been investigated, indicted and tried by these same international prosecutors and judges, used their parties’ parliamentary influence to vote foreign jurists out of the BiH judiciary in September.

Human Rights Watch then asked Inzko to use power the HR has under the 1995 Dayton peace agreement to impose an extension of the mandate keeping the internationals in place. Two former HRs as well as top judicial experts and diplomats also argued that international jurists, paid by international donations and not out of the BiH budget, should stay three more years for the benefit of the independent judiciary.

Inzko came up with a diplomatic decision: International prosecutors and judges will stay but only as advisors without executive authority. They will have to hand over ongoing cases, including those against prominent BiH politicians, to local colleagues.

“All these cases will suffer if the mandate of international judges and prosecutors is not extended,” Raffi Gregorian, the US deputy to the international peace envoy in Bosnia, said just prior to Inzko’s decision.

Milorad Barašin, BiH’s chief prosecutor, echoed Gregorian’s worries about cases that would be left hanging if the internationals leave. “Many cases, some of them at late stages, will have to be re-opened and start from scratch if the international colleagues leave before the verdicts,” Barasin told Reuters earlier.

Barasin, as well as Medžida Kreso, president of BiH Court, alerted the public months ago that removal of the internationals without raising money to replace them with local experts would seriously damage their institutions and benefit organized crime groups.

BiH politicians allied with Republika Srpska (RS) Prime Minister Milorad Dodik claim that the internationals’ presence degrades BiH sovereignty. Dodik and others have recently said they might call a secession referendum if the foreign jurists’ were kept on.

In February Dodik became the subject of an investigation ordered by an international prosecutor after the state police agency State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) filed a criminal complaint. He dismissed its allegations that he’d engaged in fraud, embezzlement and abuse of power as politically motivated.

Dragan Lukač, head of SIPAs’ organized crime division, was shifted soon after the complaint came out and now heads the SIPA unit that protects government buildings and VIPs. A BiH Parliamentary commission is checking the legality of Lukač’s removal.

Harij Furlan, the Slovenian prosecutor who ordered the investigation against Dodik, was not available for comment. Boris Grubešić, a spokesman for the BiH Prosecutor’s Office, said the chief prosecutor would comment only after the exact model of the international prosecutors' further engagement had been determined.

A list of the high-ranking BiH officials, and the array of political parties they hail from, who have been tried or at least indicted by the state Prosecutor’s Office in recent years include Dragan Čović (HDZ), Edhem Bičakčić (SDA), Hasan Čengić (SDA), Ante Jelavić (HDZ), the Lijanović brothers Jozo and Jerko (NSRZB) and Momcilo Mandic (SDS).

Like Dodik, a fair number of politicians from parties that have been called to account may also profit by this decision.

Until earlier this decade, Bosnia’s higher courts were based in the two post-war entities or sections of country – the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb RS. The fractured system meant that drug trafficking, money laundering, and other cross-entity crime went largely unpunished. In 2003, Bosnia’s top international official began staffing a new organized crime court, with foreign judges and lawyers brought in to work alongside the Bosnian professionals. Foreign jurists also came to work in Bosnia’s war crimes court when it began taking cases in 2005.

In 2008, the BiH Prosecutor’s Office investigated 639 people in 159 cases and indicted 76 in 24 cases, according to its annual report. In the same period the Court of BiH convicted 39 people in 23 cases and 14 got jail terms lasting in average 3.8 years.

Seven of 47 BiH Court judges are internationals and 16 prosecutors including three internationals work on general crime and organized crime and corruption cases, according to the web sites of these institutions.

In theory, the BiH Parliament has two more weeks in which it could act to keep foreign jurists in place and will full authority, but that seems a highly unlikely scenario. By imposing an extension while also stripping the internationals of power, Inzko is trying to please everyone