By proposing amendments to the Criminal Code of Montenegro, the Government of Montenegro seeks at all costs to protect the judiciary from reasonable criticism for more than unsatisfactory results in the fight against corruption and organized crime. The ultimate aim of such changes is to silence the part of civil society and free media that have been continuously and with arguments pointing at the shortcomings in the work of courts and prosecutors and a constant lack of institutional and individual responsibility for the state that the judiciary is in today. The proposal of the Ministry of Justice to criminalize criticism of the prosecution and the judiciary are a step backwards on the path of adopting European values, which the government advocates, at least officially.
On the other hand, there is a clear intention of the proposers of such amendments to the Criminal Code to continue the practice of not sanctioning those judges and prosecutors who violate laws and regulations, and whose mistakes in the prosecution of criminal offenses are paid by the citizens.
For years MANS has been warning that in the prosecution of organized crime and grand corruption, not only not only there are no results, but there is a lack of elementary responsibility of judges and prosecutors. As the organization with the highest number of individual complaints submitted, we have witnessed more than unsatisfactory attitude of the prosecution towards the complex problem of corruption and organized crime in the country and consistently pointed to the necessity that corrupt judges and prosecutors are held accountable for cases and situations where, instead of prison, those who must answer for misdeeds are actually in public office.
MANS has repeatedly addressed the Prosecutorial Council demanding accountability for those prosecutors who, through their actions, show that they are guided by an individual’s private interest rather than the public good. However, we have never received any response to the initiatives and the documentation on the work of the individual prosecutor.
Public criticism in ordinary countries is a necessary and desirable remedy for behavior of state institutions, including the highest judicial and prosecutorial instances. In Montenegro, if the aforementioned amendments are adopted, pointing out at the shortcomings in the work of the prosecution and suspicion that the individuals in the justice system are in conjunction or controlled by criminal organizations could be considered a criminal offense, which could result in a penalty of up to a year in prison.
Thus, it would be punishable to publicly point at the fact that there were flaws in the prosecution of the Kalic family and that citizens will pay damages from their own pockets for such proceeding, that the prosecution has not yielded any results in the “Telekom” affair due to possible political pressure from the former prime minister Djukanovic. Furthermore, it would be punishable to state that the investigation of Djukanovic’s family ties with cartels of the Balkan drug lord Darko Saric have been discarded despite a pile of evidence submitted to the prosecution, that the key actors of the “Tape Recording” affair are still in the highest state functions. It would be punishable to say that the prosecution has secret talks with members of Svetozar Marovic’s criminal organizations and that everything that has been done in the prosecution of the “Budva group” is merely an alibi seeking for those involved in the affair, that there is no word of hundreds of millions that have been laundered on the Montenegrin coast, that the prosecution is turning heads away from Carine, Solana (Saltworks), Buljarica, Avala, KAP, Jugopetrol, EPCG, Coal Mine and dozens of state-owned companies that were brutally robbed in the privatization hotchpotch by Djukanovic’s tycoons, that the prosecution does not acknowledge cigar smuggling in the north, nor ships with cocaine in the south.
Public criticism as the only legitimate way of correcting the conduct of judges and prosecutors is now trying to be portrayed as a criminal offense for which the critics would answer after a purely subjective assessment of that very judiciary on whether and to what extent their reputation has been marred.
Therefore, MANS strongly condemns the apparent intention of the government to narrow the small circle of those who do not hesitate to publicly talk about what state the Montenegrin judiciary is in and thereby protect the significantly damaged public image of the key people in the prosecution and the judiciary.
Dejan Milovac
MANS Investigation Center Director
