N18.T5 – Amendments to the SSP Law to Legalise Established Practice
HRA NEWSLETTER 18 – TOPIC 5
The amendments to the Law on the Special State Prosecution proposed by the Government of Montenegro, which were open for public consultation until the end of February, provide, among other things, that the prosecution of criminal offenders may be conducted not only by the Chief Special Prosecutor and special prosecutors, but also by prosecutors seconded to work at the SSP.
This modifies Article 4 of the current law.
“The prosecution of perpetrators of criminal offences referred to in Article 3 of this Law shall be carried out by the Chief Special Prosecutor, as head of the state prosecution, and special prosecutors as state prosecutors, whose number is determined by the Prosecutorial Council in accordance with the Law on the State Prosecution, as well as state prosecutors seconded to the Special State Prosecution. The Chief Special Prosecutor shall be accountable to the Supreme State Prosecutor for their own work and the work of the Special State Prosecution, while special prosecutors and state prosecutors seconded to the Special State Prosecution shall be accountable to the Chief Special Prosecutor for their work.”
These amendments would legalise the practice of seconded prosecutors from lower-level prosecutions prosecuting perpetrators of criminal offences falling within the jurisdiction of the Special State Prosecution — a practice they have carried out from 2022 to the present without any legal basis for doing so.
This was pointed out in 2023 by the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC), which established that prosecutors seconded to the SSP are not, under the current law, authorised to prosecute criminal offenders. The APC also considered that the secondment of prosecutors to the SSP who have fewer than ten years of prosecutorial, judicial, or bar experience, at the request of the Chief Special Prosecutor, could give rise to uncertainty in the field of the rule of law.
Article 4 of the still-applicable Law on the SSP provides that prosecution functions within that body’s jurisdiction are performed by the Chief Special Prosecutor as its head and by special prosecutors as state prosecutors (whose number is determined by the Prosecutorial Council), but not by seconded prosecutors. The same law defines that the Prosecutorial Council may, at the request of the Chief Special Prosecutor, second a state prosecutor to the SSP for the purpose of carrying out urgent or high-volume work, for a maximum period of two years.
Currently working at the SSP are six state prosecutors seconded from basic state prosecutions: Marko Ivanović, Siniša Milić, Maja Janković, Miloš Pipović, Jovan Vukotić, and Ivana Petrušić-Vukašević.
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