Serbian Opposition Proposes New Lustration Bill

Bojan Kostres, the vice-president of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, LSV, told BIRN that his party is planning to submit a motion to parliament to re-adopt the Law on Accountability for Human Rights Violations, known as the Lustration Law.

"We want to renew this law because Serbia cannot move forward until it clears up its own infamous role in the 1990s war. Lustration itself will be a way to indicate which behaviours and actions are unacceptable in the society in which we want to live," Kostres said.

Serbia's first Lustration Law came into force in 2003, stating that all prospective public officials should be checked for human rights violations dating from 1976, when the former Yugoslavia ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to the present day.

But the law was never implemented and the Serbian parliament failed even to fully staff the commission intended to implement the lustration. Almost all the members of the body then resigned in 2004 due to the lack of government support. The law then expired in 2013.

Politicians have often said that the reason why the law was never implemented was the lack of political will.

Vlajko Senic, an official from the G17 Plus party, said in 2010 that "if we create the law, I do not know how we're going to form a government".

But Kostres said a new law would guard against future authorities rehabilitating figures from the 1990s wars in the same way as Draza Mihailovic, the World War II Chetnik commander who was found guilty of collaboration with the Nazis, was recently rehabilitated.

"As Mihailovic was rehabilitated, so it could happen that 20 years from now, general Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic also be rehabilitated," he said.

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