Croatia Didn’t Wrongly Convict Wartime Police Chief: European Court

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg announced on Tuesday that it has rejected Vladimir Milankovic's complaint about the verdict convicting him of ordering illegal arrests and not punishing the detention and abuse of Serb civilians, which resulted in more than 20 deaths.

Milankovic complained that he should not have been convicted on the basis of command responsibility because at that time he was deputy commander of a local police department, not army troops.

He insisted that he could not have been responsible for all the fighters who were in the combat zone. He also argued that the concept of command responsibility had no legal basis in Croatian or international law at the time when the crimes were committed.

But the Strasbourg court's ruling said that the European Convention on Human Rights "should so far as possible be interpreted in harmony with other rules of international law of which it forms part", such are those of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY.

It said that the ICTY's statute "refers in general terms to a 'superior' and therefore does not restrict its application only to military commanders… or make any distinction between international or non-international armed conflict".

Milankovic was originally convicted and sentenced to eight years in jail at Osijek County Court in December 2013.

As police commander in the Sisak and Banovina area at the time, he was convicted of ordering the illegal arrests of Serb civilians and not punishing crimes against them, which included illegal detentions and mental and physical abuses which resulted in the deaths of 24 people between mid-July 1991 and mid-June 1992.

"From the evidence presented during the trial it has been...