Speaking at a conference in Sarajevo this week, Gordana Tadic, head of the war crimes division of the BiH Prosecutor’s Office, said that the deadline for completion of investigations and prosecutions established by the 2008 war crimes strategy will not be met.
“We should have finished the most complex investigations within seven years of the adoption of the strategy [in 2008], which will be in December. We will obviously not achieve this and we are already asking for a new deadline which should be at least three years [in the future],” Tadic said.
She said however that the eight cases sent to the country by the prosecutors at the Hague Tribunal were almost finished.
Prosecutors and police in BiH and the entities have about 500 open war crimes cases still open. Representatives of entity prosecutors who addressed the conference said that their work was hampered in part by the way cases are handled by BiH-level prosecutors before being sent down to the entities.
