An elderly Serb woman’s conviction without evidence of wrongdoing exposes flaws in the effort to prosecute war crimes in Croatia, Human Rights Watch said in a new briefing paper today. The woman, Ivanka Savic, was convicted of war crimes on January 21, 2004.
Human Rights Watch said that the two principal problems with the Savic trial were the court’s erroneous application of Croatian law and international humanitarian law, as well as ethnic bias against the Serb defendant. The paper is the third in a series of “Balkans Justice Bulletins” assessing the efforts of national authorities in the former Yugoslavia to hold war criminals accountable. The increasing willingness of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to defer war crimes trials to national jurisdictions—part of a long-term exit strategy to wind up its operations—underscores the importance of effective and fair domestic trials to secure justice and the rule of law throughout the former Yugoslavia.
“The problems at the Savic trial—bias and lack of legal professionalism—are characteristic of most war crimes trials in Croatia,” said Rachel Denber, acting executive director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia division. “Croatia’s courts need to adhere to much higher standards of justice.”
In a sharp indictment of the current standard of war crimes trials in Croatian courts, the Croatian Supreme Court recently annulled a series of decisions by county courts in war crime prosecutions involving ethnic Croat defendants. The cases, which had resulted either in acquittals or lenient sentences following convictions, were all sent for retrial. The Supreme Court has also overruled most guilty verdicts against ethnic Serbs convicted of war crimes by county courts during the same period, and sent those cases back to the original courts for retrial.
Ivanka Savic, age 78, was sentenced to four and a half years' imprisonment for war crimes by the Vukovar county court. The crimes were allegedly committed in the Croatian town of Vukovar after it fell into the hands of the Yugoslav Army and Croatian Serb rebels in November 1991.
Savic had been tried in absentia by the district court in Osijek in 1993-94. She was granted a retrial in Vukovar, this time in her presence. The trial began in May 2001 and concluded in January 2004 (with a two-year break between 2001 and 2003).
The Vukovar court ruled that Savic “denounced” (identified at the request of the Serb forces) three local ethnic Croats after the fall of Vukovar in November 1991. According to the court, the men were then taken to Serbia and subjected to ill-treatment. Human Rights Watch said that the evidence presented in the trial did not support the conclusion that Savic identified the three men, or any other person. The court also failed to establish criminal intent behind the alleged “denunciations.”
The Vukovar court found that Savic had intimidated and ill-treated an ethnic Croat woman from Vukovar, forcing the woman to serve and cook for her, and that she had stolen valuables from the woman’s house and from another house in the neighborhood. Human Rights Watch said that these findings were based on a blatant distortion of key witness testimony. Moreover, the court failed to show that Savic’s alleged actions against the ethnic Croat woman reached the requisite level of ill-treatment to be war crimes.
Savic has appealed her conviction, and the case is now pending before the Croatian Supreme Court. Her sentence will not be served until the conclusion of the appeal.
“Officials, judges, and lawyers in Croatia need to recognize that proper trials require expertise just as much as ethnic impartiality,” said Rachel Denber. “The international community and the European Union in particular, should send that message to Croatia with greater vigor than in the past.”
Croatian county courts outside large cities—which have heard the majority of war crimes cases—are particularly prone to bias and lack of professionalism in the conduct of war crimes trials. The bias has been documented by Human Rights Watch and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
In October 2003, the Croatian parliament adopted legislation that would permit the transfer of war crimes cases from county courts with territorial jurisdiction to county courts in Croatia’s four biggest cities—Zagreb, Osijek, Rijeka, and Split. The legislation has yet to be applied in any war crimes case.
