ZAGREB, December 6, 2019 – Ksenija Turković, a Croatian judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), said on Thursday that by the end of 2018 the ECHR had passed 22 verdicts for breaches of the right to an effective investigation against Croatia, which accounts for around 5% of all ECHR verdicts related to Croatia.
Turković was speaking at a conference of the Croatian Association for Criminal Sciences and Practice.
Breaches of articles of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms concerning the effectiveness of investigations are among the more frequent cases from Croatia that were adjudicated by the ECHR, it was said at the event, which focused on ways to strengthen the effectiveness of criminal proceedings by applying ECHR standards.
The event brought together researchers, representatives of prosecutorial authorities, judges and criminal lawyers as well as representatives of other high judicial institutions in Croatia and Europe.
The association’s president, Zlata Đurđević, said that by the end of 2018, 22 cases of violation of the right to an effective investigation had been determined in cases from Croatia. The figure includes a number of cases of war crimes against civilians and cases from other areas, she said.
ECHR judge Turković said that the 22 cases in which the effectiveness of the investigation was violated accounted for around 5% of all ECHR verdicts against Croatia, which, she said, was not a negligible percentage.
She said that in terms of their number, that type of violations stood out considering that there was not one dominant group of cases from Croatia and the cases were varied.
Turković said one of the reasons for the high number of such cases was the fact that Croatia lacked its own mechanism to deal with breaches of the right to an effective investigation, so all such cases immediately ended up before the ECHR.
She expressed hope a solution would be found soon, noting that the Constitutional Court had been considering issues related to investigation effectiveness since 2014.
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