For Corruption, the Most Common is Suspended Sentence; No Confirmed Indictments for High Level Corruption in the Last Year

Banja Luka, May 25, 2023 – During the last year, not a single indictment for high corruption was confirmed in the entire Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in cases from earlier years, only four final verdicts, in which prison sentences were imposed on the perpetrators of criminal acts of high corruption, were passed. Two such verdicts were pronounced in the Una-Sana Canton, one in the Republic of Srpska and one in the Brcko District, according to the data that Transparency International received from the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council and published on TI BIH’s interactive map of corruption prosecutions.

In 2022, the prosecutor’s offices in Bosnia and Herzegovina registered 1,859 reports for criminal acts of corruption, and that number is higher by 168 cases compared to last year, and the fact that two-thirds of all reports for criminal acts of corruption end with an order not to conduct an investigation is particularly worrying, as shown by data from the Monitoring of Corruption Prosecution presented by Transparency International in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Mostly fines or suspended sentences are imposed before the BiH judiciary for criminal acts of corruption, while prison sentences were imposed in only 29.6% of cases, and only 4 final court verdicts were passed in the entire BiH last year, in which the perpetrators were imposed prison sentences for crimes of high corruption.

All of this indicates that corruption is generally not prosecuted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that, when it does happen, the judiciary in Bosnia and Herzegovina is mostly resolving minor cases, while major corruption cases go unpunished.

Thus, during the last year, 1,859 reports for criminal acts of corruption were recorded, and it is particularly worrying that at the same time the number of orders not to carry out the investigation increased, and 60% of the reports were rejected, which is the largest number of such decisions since TI BiH has been monitoring corruption proceedings before the courts and prosecutor’s offices in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

These results of the judiciary work in the fight against corruption and the prosecution of criminal acts of corruption are confirmed by the findings of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2022 showing that the degree of corruption in BiH is the highest since this research was conducted, as well as that BiH is the third most corrupt country in Europe, behind war-torn Ukraine and Russia.

The reason for this state of affairs can certainly be sought in the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH, which, after the scandal surrounding the appointment of the Chief Prosecutor of BiH and the arrival of the Deputy Chief Prosecutor on the US blacklist, precisely because of suspicions of corruption, lost public confidence in its ability to adequately fight corruption.

In support of these trends is the fact that the number of indictments filed in 2022 is lower compared to 2021, and that decline can be mainly attributed to the work of the prosecutor’s offices in the territory of the Federation of BiH, which filed 14.5% fewer indictments for corruption. At the same time, 124 judgments in which the accused were found guilty were passed in this entity and in which a suspended sentence was determined instead of a prison sentence, making up 75% of the total number of cases that ended with judgments in which the accused were found guilty. For the sake of comparison, at the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the number of established suspended sentences is 3, in Republika Srpska 6, while in Brčko there is only one such decision in 2022.

The Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office of Central Bosna Canton has been distinguished by poor results for years, and in the last year it had only one confirmed indictment for corruption, and that was in the case against Jasna Babić, the director of JKP “Vitkom” d.o.o. Vitez, who was reported by TI BiH in 2019 for falsifying a document and conflict of interest. In this canton, in the last eight years, only 4 final verdicts were passed in which the defendants were declared guilty, but in which a suspended sentence was determined instead of a sentence, while 83% of corruption reports received by this prosecutor’s office from 2015 to 2022 resulted in the decision not to conduct the investigation or to suspend it, and the low level of efficiency was also shown by the Prosecutor’s Office of Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, where the last prison sentence for a criminal offense of corruption was pronounced in 2019.

According to the indictments of the prosecutor’s offices, the courts issued a total of 288 convictions for criminal offenses related to corruption, which is the best result in the observed period, but this is again not a sufficient indicator for a good assessment of the work of the judiciary as a whole, especially when analyzing the types of sentences that were imposed in these cases.

Out of the total number of judgments passed in corruption cases in 2022, 199 judgments were final, and in as many as 67% of cases a suspended sentence was imposed instead of a sentence, in 3.5% of cases a fine was imposed, while less than a third of the cases in which corruption was tried resulted in a prison sentence. Perpetrators of high corruption were sentenced to only 4 prison sentences last year, while three cases ended with verdicts that imposed a suspended sentence instead of a prison sentence, which once again confirms that corruption is generally not prosecuted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that mainly minor cases are solved while major corruption cases go unpunished.

Apart from these, other research data of Transparency International BiH indicate that the judiciary is the main source of problems when it comes to the fight against corruption, such as the research of TI BiH on the disciplinary responsibility of holders of judicial functions in BiH showed that several disciplinary measures were imposed against holders of judicial positions during 2022, but that the most common disciplinary sanction was a reduction in salary by a certain percentage, while only two holders of judicial positions were disciplinary sanctioned by being transferred to a lower position due to negligence in their work.

Press rls_25.05.23_