The grotesque of the judiciary and the police

Naum Kotevski

The trials conducted by the Special Public Prosecutor’s Office are followed by numerous controversies and political disputes, while the government and the opposition still cannot make up their minds when it comes to the adoption of the Law on Public Prosecution.

Manipulating with hearings, illogical delays, ridiculous plots… When it comes to genre, the judicial-police gang is firmly cinematically positioned between social drama and comedy, but it is definitely directing a feature firm that causes stomachaches. This gang acts like a dysfunctional squad, but if you ask each of its members about it, they will tell you that it is an “elite unit of justice” that the public has no capacity to understand.

Riding the local stereotypes of the fight against evil, the protagonists are the ones developing extremely entertaining episodes. It’s just unbelievable how the processing of trials is hindered, until, say, the Italian prosecutor’s elite has occupied Skopje in the past period, wanting to share some lessons in the direction of the real fight against crime, especially with high profile crime, and tell us that this is no longer acceptable.

The institutional explanations seem grotesque, for example, the explanation why the officials in the previous government, Mile Janakieski and Kiril Bozhinovski, who are in house arrest, were not escorted by the police to the hearing of the Titanic case, one of the main cases of the SPO for criminal association, violation of voting rights, violation of the voters’ freedom to self-determination, bribery during elections and voting, destruction of electoral material and abuse of funds to finance election campaigns. If it was Orce Kamchev, as was the case several days ago when he did not show up in court in the role of a witness in the case “Torture” case, even if we did believe that he is unavailable for the competent institutions, since the possibility that the passionate sports enthusiast, after attending the handball finals in Cologne might now be attending Copa America, cannot be excluded. Court is one thing, but sports comes first. Brazil may be a little far away, but there is nothing stopping the defendant in the “Empire” case from having some fun with the South Americans.

The trial for the “Titanic” case has been postponed due to “interference in the program”. The order, which, as the Criminal Court said, was properly sent for Janakieski never arrived at the competent police station Karposh. In the case of Bozhinovski, however, the order for escorting him to court did arrive at the police station Centar, but a mistake was made in the following of the order. A disciplinary procedure has been immediately initiated for the police officer who made the mistake, and he will be suspended.

Can you imagine, some cop from third or fourth echelon is playing and mocking with the political and court leaders who have decided to take things to the end, so that’s why they couldn’t avoid the obstacles in order for a court case of high-profile crime be finished in time. The mantra that the “ant stopped the game” should be sold to us as a lesson. Bravo!

But the truth is quite different, such a problem would be a piece of cake if there is a real system that eliminates such mistakes in a split second. No one would have even heard of the police officer, and the accused would have attended the trials in the courtroom. Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski goes on and on about how the judiciary was not reformed, and that it was not his fault that asylum seeker Nikola Gruevski fled from justice. But everyday events deny everything he claims. The blame can obviously not be addressed to one place. It is obvious that this is a systemic chaos. If the work process doesn’t stop here, it will stop there. The reasons for the collapse lie in political arrogance and in the hardly comprehensible hypocrisy that is demonstrate din public by the visible actors of the process.

That is why we are listening to phantasmagoric information from “the courtrooms that are so important” that a judge, in this case Judge Osman Shabani, has been making telephone calls to the police station during the trial and asked where his witnesses were, while Special Prosecutor Fatime Fetai assumeed that the withess might be in prison. Hilarious!

Thorough reforms are constantly mentioned in order to solve the existing structural shortcomings in the field of rule of law, the functioning of democratic institutions. In this regard, the Ambassador of the Netherlands, the country that mentions the future of the SPO as one of the main conditions of the EU integration process, said that an efficient way should be found for the SPO to be incompatible with the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO), but still retain part of the independence, and that responsibility should be borne by the opposition, as well.

That’s the principle. However, when high politics and the justice system break down into simpler entities, in the form of laws, operational decisions, trials, final judgments, and putting high-profile criminals behind bars, then they are repeatedly shown in their dwarf-like physiognomy.

Just a few years ago, we were running backwards, and now we are standing still. Interests are so intertwined, the question is whether the improvement of the legislation will take the cases of high-scale corruption and financial crime out of the drawers,  that is, the cases of which Prosecutor Lidija Raicevic publicly speaks. Or the courageous Financial Police Director Arafat Muaremi will continue to make vain attempts to establish the rule of law.