Forming a Special Prosecutor's Office Department for Combating Crime and Corruption

A public debate titled: Judiciary - Identifying the Most Effective Police and Prosecutorial Methods in Detecting and Prosecuting Corrupt Criminal Offenses was held today in Sarajevo, organized by the Anti-Corruption Network in BiH – ACCOUNT, the Anti-Corruption Network announced, reports the BiH news agency Patria. 

About 20 people participated in the debate – representatives of the Prosecutor's Office of the Federation of BiH, the Agency for Prevention of Corruption and Coordination of Fight against Corruption, the State Investigation and Protection Agency, non-governmental organizations, and the media. Data on the number of reported corruption cases were presented at the debate, and concern was expressed due to the extremely small number of conducted investigations, indictments filed, and verdicts passed, especially when it comes to convictions. Thus, in 2013, 2636 reports were recorded, of which investigations were initiated in only 747 cases, and based on that, 265 indictments were filed. Verdicts were delivered in 147 cases. It was also stated that even in cases where a conviction was handed down, the sentence for the perpetrator was at the minimum level prescribed by law or even below it.

It was also emphasized that reactive methods are mainly used in the work on investigating and identifying corrupt acts, instead of proactive ones, and standard instead of specific investigative actions that are applied worldwide.

During the debate, numerous questions were raised about the reasons for this situation. While the prosecution's stance is that the biggest cause is the insufficient staffing of prosecutor's offices and the overload with old cases, the non-governmental sector believes that the problem lies in the insufficient will to resolve corruption cases and the fact that personnel in institutions responsible for processing corruption cases are selected in a manner that is not in accordance with professional rules and legal regulations.

The common conclusion is that it is necessary to work on establishing a special department within the Prosecutor's Office of the Federation of BiH that would deal with combating corruption and organized crime, modeled after USKOK in the Republic of Croatia, in order to work more effectively on investigating and prosecuting corrupt criminal offenses.

Today's debate was also the last in a series of debates organized on this topic within the framework of the activities of the Judiciary Sectoral Working Group, which has been operating within ACCOUNT since 2012.