Human Rights Action submitted a letter to the Supreme State Prosecutor (SSP), Ivica Stanković, asking him to:

(1) Inform the public whether he has established a commission to investigate the work of public prosecutors in disputed cases (including 12 cases that HRA has brought to the attention of the State Prosecutor’s Office earlier), as announced in a TV interview with Petar Komnenić, and if so, when the commission’s report could be expected;

(2) As one of the 12 disputed cases was the case of uninvestigated torture of Ibrahim Čikić and other members of SDA in 1994, HRA expressed its concern that the State Prosecutor’s Office had dismissed the recently submitted criminal complaint for the same case without explanation and urged the SSP to specify the reason for dismissing the complaint, i.e. specify which actions had been undertaken in order to conclude that “there has been no basis to prosecute anyone for any offense” in this case. HRA emphasized that dismissing criminal charges without a convincing and substantiated explanation can only contribute to the destruction of public confidence in an independent and impartial work of the State Prosecutor’s Office;

(3) Ensure that state prosecutors adopt a more proactive approach to investigating allegations of police ill-treatment so that no case goes unnoticed and unpunished, and that their investigation always meet the standard of “effective” investigation of the European Court of Human Rights, as it has been requested by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT).

The letter is available in Montenegrin on HRA’s website: https://www.hraction.org/wp-content/uploads/Pismo-za-VDT-a-10.12.2014..pdf.

HRA Team