Source: "Blic"
Guest commentator
Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information
Infringement reports filed by the State Audit Institution (SAI) against the group of former and current officials, have reminded us once more of the possibility of omissions to penalize the perpetrators of certain criminal offences, due to the statute of limitation.
Of course, the legal system of almost every country has the statute of limitation in the Penal Law based on which, by exceeding the time limit set under the law, the state loses the right to prosecute or pronounce a sentence for a perpetrator of an act punishable under the law.
However one thing related to limitation is our specificity. More or less, all countries take care when determining the conditions of limitation, having in mind, before all, the staff, organizational and process resources of their respective state mechanisms for prosecution and penalization of criminal offenders. They take real good care that the state of limitation does not turn into an instrument of robust avoidance of responsibility. Yet, facts have shown that we take very little, almost no, care about that. Even before the case of SAI and notwithstanding the warnings of the citizens and the media, the civil sector, the Commissioner for Information, the Administration for Public Procurements and others, the statute of limitation has been exceeded in case of literally thousands of offences from the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, the Law on Public Procurements, the Law on Financing Political Parties …, and a symbolic number have been penalized.
If it has been obvious for years that, in addition to the excessive case load of the penal bodies and their reluctance to work on those ‘’delicate’’ and similar cases, one of the major reasons for not penalizing ‘’the mighty’’ are the short time limits for the statute of limitation, then those time limits doubtlessly have to be changed. Simply, there has to be a rule that one should bear the deserved consequences for breaking the law, and the possibility to avoid them should be an exemption, not the other way around, especially in case of offenders who have been chosen and paid precisely to provide implementation of the law.
