ZAGREB, Feb 5 (Hina) - The Office of the State Prosecutor has settled almost all cases it received in 2003, said Chief State Prosecutor Mladen Bajic on Thursday, voicing satisfaction with the performance of prosecutors last
year.
ZAGREB, Feb 5 (Hina) - The Office of the State Prosecutor has settled
almost all cases it received in 2003, said Chief State Prosecutor
Mladen Bajic on Thursday, voicing satisfaction with the performance of
prosecutors last year.#L#
"With these results we have reached the standards of the European
Union and we are very satisfied," Bajic told a news conference.
He went on to say that at the end of 2003, only 1,200 pending cases
remained, which is less than the usual number of cases sent to
prosecutors' offices in an average ten-day period.
According to him, the good results should be ascribed to good
re-organisation and measures aimed at transferring cases from the
overloaded Zagreb-based prosecutors' offices to other offices
throughout Croatia.
Bajic told reporters that the average time necessary for the
settlement of a case was reduced to less than 90 days.
He said that in 2003, the prosecution's staff was 15 percent smaller
than the optimum number of employees.
State prosecutors are also pleased to see that 87 percent of cases
they proceed to courts end with convictions.
However, only 11 percent of defendants get prison sentences, as a
majority of verdicts are suspended sentences. Bajic justified this
with the fact that 90 percent of state prosecutors' actions were in
the jurisdiction of municipal courts, which means that they were less
serious cases.
Courts drop charges in seven percent of all cases, and prosecutors
abandon further prosecution during the trials in six percent of
cases.
Bajic announced the establishment of an internal control office in the
State Prosecution in 2004, as one of the measures aimed at enhancing
state prosecutors' performance.
Asked whether the State Prosecution was preparing itself for the
take-over of war crimes cases from the UN war crimes tribunal, which
was recently announced by the tribunal's Chief Prosecutor Carla del
Ponte, Bajic said that his office had enjoyed excellent cooperation
with the tribunal's Prosecution for two years, and that the procedure
for the appointment of Petar Puliselic national prosecutor for war
crimes was under way.
Asked whether the State Prosecution would appoint its spokesperson
this year, Bajic said that they had been thinking of this move for two
years but that there were not enough financial means for it.
(Hina) ms