On the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared, the Coalition for RECOM calls on the governments of post-Yugoslav countries to break the silence about secret graves, because that silence is the major contributor to the public culture of silence about what happened in the past.
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On February 11th, 2011, the Humanitarian Law Center commenced an initiative calling for the dismissal of Tomislav Stojković, a Constitutional Court judge of the Republic of Serbia, on the grounds of his suspected involvement in the kidnapping of lawyer Teki Bokshi, a Kosovo Albanian. In the document submitted to Boris Tadić, then acting President of Serbia, Snežana Malović, then acting Minister of Justice, Ivica Dačić, Minister of Internal Affairs and the Supreme Court of Cassation, the HLC requested that judge Stojković be removed from duty, and the extent of his criminal responsibility fully determined.
On June 26, 2012 the Trial Panel of the Higher Court in Belgrade – War Crimes Department, presided over by judge Olivera Andjelkovic, delivered its judgment on fourteen defendants, convicted for having ordered or carried out an attack on Croat civilians in the village of Lovas, in the Republic of Croatia, during October and November 1991. The fourteen were convicted for having committed crimes of inhuman treatment, torture, violation of bodily integrity (beating, wounding or causing serious bodily harm) and murder, which resulted in the killing of 40 and the wounding of 11 Croat civilians.
Five ethnic Albanian men, suspected by the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor, for the kidnapping and murder of Serb civilians during the internal conflict in South Serbia between 1999 and 2001, were released on May 9, 2012, following the suspension of legal activity against them. The HLC believes that the arrests, detention and their eventual release were politically motivated.
On June 19th, 2012, the trial chamber of the Higher Court in Belgrade – War Crimes Department, presided over by Judge Dragan Mirković, convicted four persons indicted for the commission of war crimes against Croat civilians in the Beli Manastir municipality between August 1991 and later the same year. Zoran Vukšić was sentenced to 20 years in prison Slobodan Strigić to 10 years, Bransko Hrnjak to 5 years and Velimir Bertić to 1 year and 6 months.
The First Primary Court in Belgrade delivered a judgment obliging the Republic of Serbia to pay the amount of 1.3 million Serbian Dinars (RSD) in damages to five Kosovo Albanians in compensation for their unlawful detention lasting from eight to 17 months, and for torture inflicted on them by members of the Serbian Ministry of Interior and the Yugoslav Army. The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) believes that courts in the Republic of Serbia continue to award derisory, humiliating and unjust material compensation for past human rights abuses. The HLC will file an appeal against this judgment on behalf of the five, and will demand that the new Government establishes a level of just compensation for past human rights violations, which will abolish the de facto discrimination against non-Serb victims.
On Thursday, May 31st, 2012, Ćamil Durmišević testified before the First Basic Court in Belgrade in a compensation lawsuit against the Republic of Serbia, initiated by the Humanitarian Law Center on November 20th, 2007, on behalf of Enes Bogilović and Mušan Džebo, former detainees of the Šljivovica and Mitrovo Polje camps.
Following on from his recent statement that Vukovar was a Serbian city, the newly appointed President of the Republic of Serbia has made another serious mistake. In an interview with RTCG (the Montenegrin national broadcaster) on May 31st, 2012 he denied that genocide had been committed in Srebrenica, thus damaging the image of the Reublic of Serbia, which has previously recognized and accepted the judgment of the International Court of Justice, by which it was established that the Army of Republika Srpska committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.