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Zagreb - Chief State Prosecutor Dražen Jelenić presented in Parliament on Wednesday work reports for 2017 and 2018, saying his office (DORH) paid special attention to corruption cases but that it was difficult to expect results overnight because of numerous unfounded reports.
In the field of corruption and organised crime, the USKOK agency is doing a good job, achieving enviable results, but given the complexity of the cases, results cannot be expected overnight, notably because of the high number of unfounded reports, Jelenić said.
Those reports are filed by citizens against officials whose work they consider illegal or rife with corruption, and although all the reports are looked into, USKOK is not an oversight authority, he added.
DORH also pays a lot of attention to war crimes, with proceedings launched against nearly 3,700 persons and over 2,100 indictments filed in 2017 and 2018, Jelenic said. Despite difficulties in obtaining evidence, all information is checked and will continue to be in cooperation with the police, he added.
In 2017 and 2018, over 100 hate speech reports were filed and 67 were dismissed because, colloquially and legally, hate speech is understood differently, Jelenić said.
As for frequent public criticisms that investigations last too long, he said 92% of the 2,615 completed in 2018 were completed within six months and only 8% within a year, he said.
Prosecutors' offices indicted 16,102 persons and 96% of the indictments were upheld, he added.
Last year trial courts delivered judgments for 15,435 persons, 91% of which were convictions. More than 3,000 persons were given prison sentences, of which nearly one in three were exchanged with community service, while conditional sentences account for 75% of convictions.
Between 2016 and 2018, the promptness of prosecutors' offices in solving cases went up from 91% to 104% and the time to solve a case is becoming shorter, Jelenić said. In said period, the number of criminal and civil cases slowly but constantly decreased, impacting the number of solved and unsolved cases.
In 2018, USKOK received 491 cases, approximately the same as in 2018, but the number of unsolved cases is constantly decreasing.
At the end of 2018, 352 USKOK cases were underway in court, with 987 indictees without a verdict. USKOK's promptness rate that year was 102%, the same as in 2017.
DORH's promptness rate in 2018 was 104%, the time of resolving cases is becoming shorter and more cases were solved than received.
In 2018, prosecutors' offices received 35,154 criminal reports against identified perpetrators and 26,848 against unidentified perpetrators, down 8%.