The US organisation for the protection of human rights said that on December 17 EU heads of states and government, acting as the European Council, decided that membership negotiations with Croatia would begin on March 17, 2005 provided that Croatia cooperated fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague by that date. The HRW says, however, that there are no comparable conditions for progress on domestic war crimes trials, which have been plagued by bias, lack of professionalism in the courts and inadequate police cooperation.
"Proper domestic war crimes trials in Croatia simply won"t happen without EU pressure," said Rachel Denber, acting Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
In a study of war crimes trials in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro, Human Rights Watch with headquarters in New York found trials in the region suffer from ethnic bias on the part of judges and prosecutors, poor case preparation by prosecutors, inadequate cooperation by the police in the conduct of investigations, poor interstate cooperation on judicial matters, and ineffective witness protection mechanisms.
In Croatia, Human Rights Watch found the additional problems of trials being conducted in the absence of the accused, and the use of group indictments that fail to specify an individual defendant"s role in the commission of the alleged crime, the HRW said.
A hugely disproportionate number of cases in Croatia have been brought against the ethnic Serb minority, some on far weaker charges than cases against ethnic Croats, the HRW said.
According to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), in the first ten months of 2004, Serbs represented 23 of the 27 persons arrested, 85 of the 105 on trial, and 18 of the 20 convicted. Ethnic Serbs have also been convicted where the evidence did not support the charges, the organisation for the protection of human rights said.
According to the HRW, there has only been one case in which a Croatian court properly tried a war crime committed against ethnic Serbs: the 1991 killing of Serb civilians around Gospic. Comparable war crimes committed in the Medak pocket, Vukovar, Zagreb (the murder of the Zec family), Lora, Pakracka Poljana, Korana bridge and Bjelovar have either not been prosecuted at all or have resulted in acquittals, the organisation said. In the Paulin Dvor case, only one person was convicted, although many others participated in the killings of 19 Serb civilians in that village, the HRW said.
By contrast, Croatian courts have found ethnic Serbs guilty of war crimes even for such acts as theft of bedclothes, plates, or an alarm clock from a house, as in the conviction of Ivanka Savic by a court in Vukovar, in January, the HRW said.
"Until Croatia demonstrates it can try war crimes cases fairly, it won"t be possible to say that the rule of law has fully taken hold in the country," said Denber. "The European Union must insist that Croatia apply fair trial standards, and it must be willing to suspend membership negotiations if clear improvements are not made," she said.