N10.T3 – TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF SLAVOLJUB ŠĆEKIĆ CONCLUDED, VERDICT IN SEPTEMBER
HRA NEWSLETTER 10 – TOPIC 3
The trial against four defendants accused of murdering police inspector Slavoljub Šćekić has concluded before the Appellate Court of Montenegro. The verdict is expected to be delivered on September 24. The criminal proceedings against the accused have been ongoing for nearly 20 years. During the process, a total of eight verdicts have been issued: three first-instance and five second-instance decisions, along with three rulings by the Supreme Court on appeals, and one ruling by the Constitutional Court. The verdicts have been overturned six times.
The European Court of Human Rights has twice found violations of the rights of the accused, Ljubo Bigović, regarding prolonged detention and conditions of detention.
The State Prosecutor’s Office has requested prison sentences of 30 years each for the four defendants accused of murder — Saša Boreta, Ljubo Bigović, Ljubo Vujadinović and Milan Šćekić. The family of the murdered Slavoljub Šćekić has also joined this request.
On the other hand, the defendants claim they are not guilty, that is, they did not participate in the murder of the police inspector. Their defense attorney insists that there is no valid evidence against them, especially that one of the main pieces of evidence — the testimony of the protected witness Zoran Vlaović, known as Bohum — is not credible.
“The man who has been convicted 14 times with final judgments, three times for rape, four times for fraud… A man who in numerous cases in Montenegro offered to be a protected witness and solve everything for us here, for which, of course, he received benefits from this state”, pointed out defense lawyer Dragoljub Đukanović after the trial.
To recall, Slavoljub Šćekić was killed in front of his family home in the Tološi neighborhood of Podgorica on August 30, 2005, when the killer shot him with an automatic weapon.
The indictment against the accused Boreta, Bigović, Vujadinović and Šćekić was filed one year after the crime, and the first verdict was issued in 2009. The guilty verdict was delivered by a panel of judges chaired by the judge of the Higher Court in Podgorica, Lazar Aković.
A year later, the Appellate Court panel, led by judge Milivoje Katnić, overturned that verdict, stating that the evidence from the first-instance verdict was insufficient to conclude that Šćekić was killed by a criminal organization in an organized manner, and they particularly questioned the validity of the testimony of witness Žarko Radulović.
In the retrial, judge Slavka Vukčević of the Higher Court issued a guilty verdict in 2011, sentencing all defendants to 30 years in prison.
However, in 2012, the Appellate Court panel, again headed by Katnić, overturned that Higher Court verdict concerning the prison sentences imposed.
The third judge of the Higher Court in Podgorica to preside over the trial panel in this case, Biljana Uskoković, issued a third guilty verdict the same year. It was established that Boreta and Bigović instigated Šćekić and Vujadinović to kill the police inspector out of greed. They did so because inspector Šćekić was on their trail while investigating an attempted extortion and a series of bomb attacks at the construction site of the Splendid Hotel. According to the indictment, the direct perpetrator of the murder was Milan Šćekić.
However, it turned out that the proceedings were far from over. In 2013, the Appellate Court upheld the verdict of the Higher Court. However, upon appeal, the Supreme Court in 2014 annulled the Appellate Court’s guilty verdict and returned the case for retrial and reconsideration. In 2015, the Appellate Court confirmed the 30-year prison sentences for the four defendants. At the end of October 2015, the Supreme Court of Montenegro upheld that verdict.
However, in 2019, the Constitutional Court of Montenegro accepted the defense’s appeal. It found that the accused’s right to a fair trial had been violated regarding the acquisition and quality of the protected witness’s evidence and the right to defense. Additionally, the court pointed out the possibility of an excessive charge against the accused Ljubo Bigović, because the first-instance court, contrary to the factual description in the indictment, omitted allegations of committing the criminal act of incitement to murder during temporary release from custody and instead determined that the act was committed earlier, before the deprivation of liberty.
Such a change was not included in the indictment, so the court was deciding on facts that were not the subject of the indictment, and the defense of the accused did not have the opportunity to prepare for them, thereby violating the right to defense.
Therefore, in December 2019, the Supreme Court annulled the Appellate Court verdict from February 20, 2015, and returned the case for reconsideration. After two years, on September 5, 2022, that court annulled the verdict of the Higher Court in Podgorica from October 19, 2012, and again sent the case back for a new trial.
“In the opinion of the panel of this court, these are significant violations that cannot be remedied in proceedings before the second-instance court, which is why the first-instance verdict was annulled and the case was returned to the same court for retrial,” the Appellate Court announced at the time.
However, despite the opinion of the colleagues from the second-instance court, the Higher Court in Podgorica stated that it was not competent to continue the proceedings, so the trial nonetheless resumed before the Appellate Court.
This case has been accompanied by numerous controversies — from verdicts that contained technical and substantive errors, to the fact that the Strasbourg court confirmed unlawful conduct towards one of the accused.
For example, as early as April 24, 2012, the Higher Court made an official note stating that the case file was missing a compact disc containing the testimony of the protected witness. Three years later (in 2015), the Supreme Court confirmed to Vijesti that they had the disc with the witness’s testimony but did not confirm whether it was the original.
The rights of the accused, Ljubo Bigović, were decided twice by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled against Montenegro in 2019 on his application. In the first application, the European Court in 2019 found a violation of the prohibition of torture (Article 3) due to the conditions he endured in detention, and a violation of the right to liberty and security (Article 5) due to insufficient justification for the length of his detention, which lasted 5 years and 5 months. He was awarded €7,500 in non-material damages at that time. In the second application, Bigović in 2020 submitted complaints concerning Articles 3 (prohibition of torture), 5 (right to liberty and security), 6 (right to a fair trial), 8 (right to respect for private and family life), and 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the Convention. The case was marked as urgent and resolved through a friendly settlement. Bigović then waived any further complaints against Montenegro regarding the appeals, on the condition that the Government of Montenegro pays him €1,800 for non-material damages and €500 for legal costs. Additionally, there was an obligation for the urgent transfer of Bigović from the cell he was occupying at the time to a cell with conditions corresponding to those after August 2009.
Bigović and the other accused in this case are still in custody.
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