One-third of the war crimes indictments filed by the BiH Prosecutor’s Office this year have been transferred to lower courts, bringing criticism of prosecutors for failing to focus on the most complex cases.
The fact that a third of the indictments raised this year in war crimes cases were deemed insufficiently complex to try at the state level shows that the Bosnian prosecution is still refusing to follow a national strategy adopted in 2008 to deal with the country’s huge backlog of war crimes cases.
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Bosnia’s revised war crimes strategy, which was drafted because previous targets for clearing the huge backlog of cases were not met, but which has been awaiting approval by the country’s Council of Ministers for more than a year, also stresses the need to send simpler cases to lower-level courts in the entities so the state-level court can get on with hearing the more important and complex cases.
