Today the Supervisory Board for the supervision of the implementation of the BiH War Crimes Strategy convened its fifth session, attended also by Principal Deputy High Representative Dr. Raffi Gregorian.
The Supervisory Board and the PDHR expressed their shared concerns regarding the inadequate response to date of Entity, District, and Cantonal prosecutors to provide appropriate and reliable data on investigations and indictments required by the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH to complete a central database on all outstanding war crimes cases in the country.
The War Crimes Strategy, adopted by the BiH Council of Ministers in December 2008 in line with the Peace Implementation Council Steering Board’s requirements for transitioning OHR to EUSR, clearly stipulates instructions for the collection of these data, but Entity, District and Cantonal prosecutors have yet to comply with them. Failure to provide such data has contributed to recent misunderstandings as well as continued duplication of investigations of the same crimes at different levels, one of the many problems that the BiH War Crimes Strategy is supposed to resolve.
The Supervisory Board and the PDHR agreed that the prosecutors’ offices need to take their responsibility under the Strategy more seriously. The PDHR pledged his full support to the Supervisory Board’s efforts to ensure compliance with its outstanding data requests. OHR calls upon all these offices to submit full and workable data to the Chief Prosecutor’s Office of BiH by the 1 September deadline.