Preliminary findings of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances announced yesterday (30 June 2014), as well as the recent conclusions of the Committee against Torture, prove that both the UN and the European Union pay particular attention to the prosecution of war crimes in Montenegro. As the Committee did earlier, the UN Working Group expressed its concern that no one’s responsibility has been established for the committed crimes in final decisions in Bukovica and Deportation cases, because Montenegrin courts interpreted international humanitarian law erroneously and failed to fully apply domestic law. The UN Working Group also added concern that the court based its verdict in Deportation case on alarming “legal theory under which some of the acts do not constitute war crimes either because the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina was not an international armed conflict or because Montenegro was not a part of the conflict”.

HRA filed an initiative with the Acting Supreme State Prosecutor Veselin Vučković to raise a request for the protection of legality against the Appellate Court judgment in Deportation case, precisely because the Court applied the law arbitrarily in that case, insisting on legally irrelevant, but politically important fact about the nature of armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, arguing that because the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina was allegedly not international, those accused of war crimes in Montenegro in relation to that conflict could not be held accountable for war crimes. Mr Vučković has not declared his opinion on this initiative for more than half a year.

It is necessary that Montenegro appoint as the Supreme State Prosecutor a person with knowledge and courage to cope with the past by prosecuting those responsible for war crimes.