Human Rights Action (HRA) disagrees with the proposed Draft Law on the Special State Prosecutor’s Office suggesting war crimes no longer fall within the jurisdiction of the Special State Prosecutor’s Office, but within the High Prosecutors’ Offices instead.

HRA strongly disagrees with the position uttered by the representative of the Ministry of Justice at the public discussion that war crimes are a matter of the past, whereas the Special Prosecutor’s Office should deal with the future only. On the contrary, we believe that in order to achieve the rule of law it is necessary to resolve the crimes from the past such as war crimes that were never properly investigated.

By excluding war crimes from the jurisdiction of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, the state would show, also symbolically, that war crimes cases do not have the same priority as cases of corruption or organised crime.

As the war crime investigations and trials last for years, even when they were under jurisdiction of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, one cannot expect the regular prosecutors to perform these duties more efficiently, being as overloaded as they are.

HRA determined that the state prosecutors have shown obvious lack of interest for investigating war crimes to date. They proved unprepared to initiate investigations against all reasonably suspected persons who occupied higher positions in the command chain, they were not committed to thorough investigation, and they imprecisely qualified the offences and acts that the responsible persons were or could have been charged with.

HRA team