Unofficial: Prosecutors Drop Complaint Against Vucic

Several media outlets reported unofficially today, October 20, that the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade has dismissed the criminal complaint that Democratic Party president Srdjan Milivojevic filed against Serbia’s recent president Aleksandar Vucic over his pardon decisions. There is no official confirmation from the competent institutions as of publication, so the dismissal can only be relayed as information not backed by a document.

According to B92, Novosti, Kurir and Borba.me, the prosecution found that Vucic committed no criminal offense by issuing the pardons, because the decisions were made in line with the laws in force. None of those outlets publishes a statement from the prosecution or a case number, and the reasoning arrives secondhand, not as the text of a decision. We are therefore reporting it as an unofficial rationale, not as a statement by the prosecution.

What did Milivojevic report?

Milivojevic filed the complaint against Vucic on suspicion of abuse of office. It concerns the pardons and amnesties that Vucic issued as president of the Republic in the final days of his term. He submitted it to the Appellate Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade, and the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office passed it on to the Special Department for Combating Corruption of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade, as Insajder reported on October 17. We covered that stage in the article “Complaint Against Vucic Over Pardons Goes to Higher Prosecutor’s Office.” An unofficial dismissal would be the outcome of that procedure.

In the complaint’s rationale, Milivojevic stated that Justice Minister Nenad Vujic submitted neither the required opinion nor a proposal for a pardon. He added that employees of that ministry had said several times that no one from the President’s General Secretariat had approached them about taking part in such decisions. At a press conference in front of the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade, he concluded:

“As a result, the pardon and amnesty procedure was conducted without transparency and without the publication of information.”

Milivojevic also said that establishing a link between the pardons and the protection of Vucic and people close to him would “create the preconditions for launching other criminal proceedings.” He also put forward a proposal on how the case should proceed:

“I propose that the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade hand the case over to the competent prosecution office and that it immediately open and conduct an investigation.”

Who was pardoned?

The public still has no complete answer to that question. At the end of September, at a press conference, Vucic said he had pardoned or amnestied a total of 49 people. He indirectly identified only 12 of them, whom he called the “Novi Sad group.” According to Insajder, they are students and activists who were charged with several offenses against the constitutional order over a secretly recorded conversation at the premises of the Movement of Free Citizens in Novi Sad. B92 reports that they include a group of activists from the organization to which Mila Pajic belongs.

The names of the others who were pardoned have never been made public, and the pardon acts have not been published anywhere. Milivojevic said that he himself does not know who all the pardoned people are, apart from those whose names have been spoken publicly, but that he suspects they include people facing criminal proceedings in the Canopy, General Staff and Jovanjica cases.

What is still unknown

The prosecution has not published a decision, so it is unclear on what grounds the complaint was dismissed, or whether the unofficial rationale matches what the act itself says. Milivojevic’s reaction to the unofficial reports is not known as of publication, nor is any statement by Vucic about the prosecution’s decision. B92 states explicitly in its report that the competent institutions have not confirmed the dismissal.