In the coming period, Montenegrin judges will face a big test because the former leaders of the third branch of government, Vesna Medenica and Blažo Jovanić, as well as other judges, former heads of state bodies, businessmen and customs officials, who were arrested in the previous period, will sit at a defence table.
However, we still do not have an answer to many cases from previous years.
New Special State Prosecutor’s Office (SSPO), headed by Vladimir Novović, launched numerous investigations in eight months, but also filed indictments against the former top officials of the Montenegrin judiciary, Vesna Medenica and Blažo Jovanić.
However, the judiciary still has no answer to numerous alleged cases of the high-level corruption which have burdened society for years, Dejan Milovac from the Network for Affirmation of NGO Sector (MANS) claims.
“We see cases like Petar Ivanović, whose immunity was lifted almost a year ago or more than a year ago, and the State Prosecutor’s Office and the judiciary are yet to do anything to solve specifically this case. The same is with the case of Slavoljub Stijepović, who was first cleared of suspicion and then brought back into focus for money laundering and illegal influence on voters”, Milovac said.
Milovac claims that the accusations against the former president of the Supreme Court, Vesna Medenica, that she influenced the judges to conclude certain cases in favour of the companies “Fab Live” and “Cijevna Commerce”, regardless of the factual situation, point to the need to review other infamously concluded cases.
“We cannot know whether the length of those proceedings and their final result was actually ignorance or corruption,” Milovac said.
Among those proceedings, Milovac singles out the case against the former mayor of Podgorica, Miomir Mugoša, who was acquitted by the first-instance verdict of having damaged the city budget by 6.7 million euros in the Carine case.
MANS suspects that in previous years there has been a synchronization between the State Prosecutor’s Office and the judiciary in some big cases which were dismissed, despite the large amount of evidence, and there has been no progress so far. Years ago, as a rule, the only disciplinary proceedings against judges and prosecutors were due to failure to report property statements, while prosecutors were always given a score five for the quality of their work.
“We have seen the examples of organized crime such as Kalić and Šarić, and MANS often mentions them as reference examples that literally no one was held accountable for obvious mistakes, both by the State Prosecutor’s Office that prepared an indictment that was not viable and by judiciary that accepted such indictment and tried people based on a previously failed proceedings”, Milovac said.
That is why Milovac says that expectations from the Prosecutor’s Council headed by Maja Jovanović were high, but…
“It does not give us the right to believe that anything serious is happening there, i.e. we still do not have a clear message that prosecutors who do not do their job well will actually be held accountable for it”, Milovac said.
Meanwhile, the number of cases older than three years before the court is constantly increasing. Over the past ten months, the number of red covers has increased by more than 1,600.
