New irregularities related to the issuance of Certificate of no criminal conviction

Transparency International in BiH determined a new case of irregularities related to the issuance of Certificates of no criminal conviction, based on which the convicted individual has been appointed to the position of the Senior Official in the Municipality of Samac, despite the legal consequences of the conviction and the prohibition of performing official duties which were still in effect.

Banja Luka, 3rd July 2018 – Transparency International in BiH (TI BiH) warns about increasingly popular phenomena of electing and appointing persons to the positions within public administration although those persons were convicted to the prison sentence and were under the impact of legal consequences of the conviction at the time of appointment, but in spite were given the Certificate of no criminal conviction. At the beginning of last year one person was appointed the Head of Department for Local Economic Development of the Municipality of Samac, although he could not have been given the certificate of no criminal conviction  for the purpose of competition procedure since he was legally convicted at the time.

Police station Samac issued to Predrag Nedic a certificate of no criminal conviction in spite of the fact that at that time he should have been experiencing the consequences of the final sentence of one year of imprisonment. After investigating the regularity of competition procedure, TI BiH has come to the conclusion that the Basic Court in Modrica, as the first-instance court, had never provided any information from the judgment to the relevant police station, for keeping criminal record. In fact, the Court did so only after TI BiH had determined the controversial failure.

For this reason, TI BiH submitted to the Office of the Disciplinary Counsel a disciplinary complaint against Zdenko Vranjic, then president of the Basic Court in Modrica, and the acting judge Dragoja Raus, for suspicion of having committed disciplinary offenses by failing to submit information necessary for keeping criminal records. They admit in Basic Court in Modrica that they made a mistake, but the current president of the Court Vinko Miladinovic emphasizes it has been five years and the statute of limitations became effective so no legal action could have been initiated against responsible persons. Additionally he reduces the consequences of the conducted mistakes, justifying them with the amount of work and the fact that at that time „the preparations for adaptation of court building had started“.

Legal consequences of conviction are very important tools of criminal law that can result in prohibition on performing official duties for a certain period of time. In this specific case, the convicted person has not suffered the consequences at all, thanks to the conducted failures, in which way they allowed him to be appointed the Senior Official in the Municipality of Samac. Such treatment initiates a question if the laws and prescribed sanctions are equally applied to all citizens, and if there is corruption related to issuance of Certificates of no criminal conviction.

TI BiH reminds that misappropriations with issuance of Certificates of no criminal conviction have happened before as well, and the most recent example is the case of Hague war crime suspect Blagoja Simic, who was issued a Certificate of no criminal conviction by local police station in Samac. He submitted this Certificate as one of the documents requested by the public competition after which he was appointed to the position of the Director of Health Center Samac. In 2015 TI BiH found out that there are two persons working for the Indirect Taxation Authority although they have been under investigation for criminal offenses, and one of them had even been previously convicted of tax evasion and a new proceeding for organized crime was conducted against her. In this case the Certificate of no criminal proceeding conducted against the individual and issued by the Court was submitted. The competition procedure has not requested the Certificate of no criminal conviction issued by the relevant police station. All those cases show there are intolerable mistakes related to keeping criminal records, without any consequences for the responsible persons.