ZAGREB, Feb 5 (Hina) - Croatia's Supreme Court has upheld the appeal of defendant Svetozar Karan against the ruling of the Gospic County Court which sentenced him to 13 years in prison, finding him guilty of war crimes. The Supreme
Court has thus quashed the first-instance ruling and transferred the case back to the County Court in Gospic, asking that it renew the trial before a changed panel of judges.
ZAGREB, Feb 5 (Hina) - Croatia's Supreme Court has upheld the appeal of
defendant Svetozar Karan against the ruling of the Gospic County Court
which sentenced him to 13 years in prison, finding him guilty of war
crimes. The Supreme Court has thus quashed the first-instance ruling
and transferred the case back to the County Court in Gospic, asking
that it renew the trial before a changed panel of judges.#L#
The five-member council of the Supreme Court has said that the Gospic
court incorrectly established the facts of the case and failed to give
valid reasons for not accepting statements of witnesses who asserted
that Svetozar Karan, from the town of Korenica, was innocent.
Furthermore, the local court failed to question contradictory
statements of witnesses who claimed that Karan had been one of those
who harassed prisoners of war detained by Serb rebels in a jail near
Korenica.
A part of the first-instance ruling leaves room for serious doubts as
to the impartiality of the court while establishing the individual
responsibility of a person.
Karan was sentenced to 13 years' imprisonment after the Gospic court
last year found him guilty of war crimes which he committed in 1991 as
a member of reserve police units of the self-styled Serb Krajina in
Korenica and in 1995, when in his capacity as military policeman of
Serb units he beat and inhumanely treated the POW, detained in the
Farkasici prison. By doing so he violated the Geneva Conventions, the
Gospic court concluded.
The Supreme Court said in its explanation that according to the
evidence it presented, the local court had not established with full
certainty that the defendant Karan had been one of the persons whom
victims identified as perpetrators of the said crimes.
The Supreme Court also said that the local court wrongly established
Karan's command responsibility as he had been commander of the
guards.
In addition, the local court overstepped the frameworks of the
structure of the verdict in its written explanation, particularly in
the segment in which the presiding judge comments on the motives of
Karan's return to Croatia in 2000. The explanation of the verdict
reads that he came back "to live off Croatia in order to weaken it
economically and push it into disaster and disappearance so as to
implement the memorandum of the SANU (Serbian Academy of Arts and
Sciences)".
(Hina) ms