Prijovic claims pardoned 49 include Vesic and Dimoska
The president of the Belgrade Bar Association says he has information that defendants in the canopy and General Staff cases are on the pardon list, and wants answers from Brnabic and Vujic.
Vladimir Prijovic, president of the Belgrade Bar Association, said today that he personally has information that the 49 pardoned people include defendants in the cases over the collapse of the canopy and over the General Staff building. He named Goran Vesic, Anita Dimoska and Jelena Tanaskovic. He offered no evidence.
The Bar Association has put the question of who was pardoned, and why, to Serbia’s acting president Ana Brnabic and to the justice minister in the caretaker government, Nenad Vujic. According to Prijovic, the pardon was signed by former president Aleksandar Vucic in his last days in office.
What exactly does Prijovic claim?
Prijovic says most of the 49 pardoned people probably face criminal proceedings. In a statement to N1, he linked the list of names to the tragedy in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people, and to the General Staff case:
“I personally have information from various sides that this list includes defendants in the canopy collapse and the General Staff case, so Goran Vesic, and Anita Dimoska, Jelena Tanaskovic and so on. In other words, that it includes people who may be directly responsible for the deaths of 16 people. And if that is really so, then it is no surprise that this information is being hidden, because it would provoke justified outrage among citizens and discontent ahead of the elections”
It is worth separating what he said from what is established. The Novi Sad canopy collapse did take 16 lives, but Prijovic spoke about responsibility conditionally: people who “may be directly responsible”. The claim rests on unnamed sources, not on a document shown to the public.
Why is the Bar Association demanding answers from Brnabic and Vujic?
Prijovic starts from the law. In his words, a pardon procedure must be initiated by the justice minister, ex officio. That is why, he says, the question goes beyond a single list:
“The question of a pardon is not a matter of anyone’s free will or goodwill”
He argues that citizens’ right to know who was pardoned and why follows from the fact that citizens are the bearers of sovereignty. He expects no answer from the authorities. “This government has shown great irresponsibility and disregard for the law and the Constitution,” Prijovic told N1.
The Justice Ministry has not officially reacted. The Beta agency reported that an unnamed source in the ministry said officials there do not know whom Vucic pardoned and will not take part in carrying out that decision. Prijovic interpreted it this way:
“On the other hand, when the Justice Ministry says it knows nothing about this, to me that is either a plain lie or illegality, there is no third option. By law, the justice minister must initiate that procedure ex officio. And if the Ministry’s answer is that it knows nothing about it, that means either they are lying or the pardon procedure is unlawful”
He sees the lack of any statement as a separate problem: “Citizens, as the bearers of sovereignty, are being denied key information, and right before the elections,” he said. Asked which criminal offenses would be in play if the decision was made without a proposal from the ministry, he answered that one would probably be abuse of office, adding that “such an act by a president cannot be lawful”.
What would the pardon mean for proceedings under way?
Prijovic warns that if a court were to halt a case or issue an acquittal on the basis of a pardon, the public would learn of it only after the elections scheduled for October 25. He sees a political layer in this too, because, as he puts it, the public has no answer right before election day:
“We have a wall of silence, and for that very reason a situation in which all sorts of stories and speculation spread easily.”
He added that if the announcement turns out to have been only an announcement, its function would be purely political and would be an even clearer example of an official’s campaign.
The question of who is on the list has been raised from another direction as well. Since yesterday there has been a further question: whether the pardoned include people mentioned by Radar in its report on correspondence from the Sky app, which, according to that reporting, indicates that Darko Saric financed the Serbian Progressive Party. We reported earlier on new messages from that correspondence. Students are filing freedom-of-information requests about the pardon of 49 people the same day.
The list of the pardoned has not been published, and there is no official statement from the Justice Ministry on the matter. Until that changes, Prijovic’s claim about the names remains without evidence the public could check.
