Drive For Balkan Extradition Deal Nears End

This week, Serbia’s Justice Ministry expects official confirmation from partner ministries in Croatia and Slovenia that they are ready to sign a Convention on Regional Arrest Warrants.

If they do so, the deal should be signed by almost all countries in Southeast Europe, Serbia’s State Secretary for Justice Slobodan Homen said to Balkan Insight.

A working group of regional legal experts could be formed and the Balkan Arrest Warrant deal signed as soon as January.

Photo by FoNet archive

The arrest warrant will be identical to the European Arrest Warrant, EAW, used in the European Union, “as all the signatory countries are either members of the EU or in the process of EU integration,” Homen explained.

Legal experts from Serbia, Albania and the EU say the treaty will speed up tardy extradition procedures, close glaring loopholes and cut political influence over the judiciary.

But experts say the outcome would be stronger if Kosovo was not left out. Pristina has not been invited to sign the deal, mainly because Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence and disputes its presence in regional bodies.

Too few sentences:

The initiative for the regional arrest warrants came from the Serbian Justice Ministry and was presented to neighbouring states at a regional ministerial conference in Slovenia in April.

Montenegro, Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania have already confirmed agreement while Slovenia and Croatia, which recently elected new governments, are expected to send official confirmation this week.

European Commission Progress Reports on Western Balkans countries, including Serbia, routinely complain that criminal investigations related to organized crime rarely end in indictments and jail sentences.

The Commission reports urged countries in the region to improve their legal capacities and boost regional cooperation between national courts.

As of now, criminals regularly evade justice by jumping the borders, as not all countries currently have extradition treaties with one another.

The collapse of the former Yugoslav federation resulted in millions of people holding two or even three local passports.

It is estimated that Croatia and Serbia have issued in total more than a million citizenships for refuges coming from other parts of the former federation. Liberal citizenship procedures have proved a boon to criminals.

Demands for a stronger regional cooperation in the field of justice and police came from the European Commissioner for Internal Affairs in her first visit to Belgrade in November.

Cecilia Malstrom said one solution to the current problems lay in a Regional Arrest Warrant, empowering each country to prosecute offenders from the others, regardless of nationality, as is done within the EU.

The Balkan Arrest Warrant will be identical to EAW and can be issued for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution or enforcing a custodial sentence, though only for offences carrying a maximum penalty of 12 months or more.

The Balkan warrant would replace the existing European Convention on Extradition of 1957, which has proved complex and vulnerable to political influence.

The EAW by contrast has already proved efficient in removing the politics from decision-making and converting the process into a system run entirely by the judiciary.

Professor Goran Ilic, of Belgrade University, said the current system was too complex and subject to political influence.

“If you now want to extradite someone [from Serbia] to Croatia, you need a signature from the Minister of Justice. This initiative will restore decision-making to the courts and will be a step forward in eliminating politics from justice,” he said.

The new system will greatly improve efficiency in dealing with criminals, Slobodan Homen maintained.

“Countries will agree where someone will be judged… and most importantly the joint warrant will prevent crimes from becoming obsolescent. Extraditions today between states can take too much time,” he said.

According to the European Commission’s latest data, the EAW has sped up extraditions within member states to an average of 48 days.

Albanian legal expert Enis Pirdeni told Balkan Insight: “All countries have agreed that cooperation is crucial when it comes to the fight against organized crime, so the borders should not matter.

“With the regional warrant we want to show that we are willing to cooperate in ‘our’ smaller area.”

“Establishing better confidence between countries of the region and between member states of the EU and countries of the region is one of our main objectives,” Serbia’s draft initiative for the Regional Arrest Warrant says.

“As a country, you will renounce a part of your sovereignty, because you believe that the signatory countries will also guarantee [your citizens] a fair trail,” explained Homen.

Professor Ilic agreed that a pan-Balkan justice treaty will help build up broader trust and solidarity.

“The idea is that the public prosecutor from Sarajevo should be able to use evidence collected in Belgrade or Skoplje with the same confidence that he uses evidence obtained in his own country,” he noted.

Closer cooperation on justice issues between Balkan states could not be timelier.

According to EUROPOL, Balkan countries are being targeted as transitional countries for arms and drugs smuggling from Central and South Asia to Western Europe as well as from the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East to Central, Northern and Western Europe.

Kosovo in the cold:

One omission in the plan is Kosovo, however. This country has not been invited to join the scheme.

“The organized crime rate in the Balkans could be reduced with this agreement, but better results could be achieved if Kosovo was involved in this process,” Pirdeni told Balkan Insight.

“Now we will have one state that will remain a safe haven for the perpetrators [of cross-border crime],” he added.

Serbia’s Justice Ministry says Kosovo was not included in the initiative because Kosovo does not have contractual relations with the EU.

“There is also no reciprocity in legal issues between Serbia and [the EU law mission in Kosovo] EULEX, which is in charge of cooperation [in justice] between Belgrade and Pristina,” Homen added.  

Whatever Belgrade’s official explanation for the decision to leave Kosovo outside the door, most observers have no doubt that Serbia’s internal politics have dictated this decision.

Sasa Djordjevic, from the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, says it is not unusual for political interests in one or other country to impede moves towards regional cooperation.

“We had similar situation when Croatia did not sign a major convention on regional police cooperation in South-east Europe as their government maintained that Croatia was not a part of the Western Balkans,” Djordjevic recalled.

“Leaving Kosovo out of this initiative is without doubt a political decision,” he added.

“We are all witnesses to the fact that sometimes politics does not take us in the right direction.”