The High Criminal Court has rejected a motion by Branimir Glavas for transferring a war crimes case against him and his co-defendants from the Zagreb County Court to the Osijek County Court.

The trial of Glavas and the other defendants charged with war crimes against Serb civilians in Osijek in 1991 started anew in early July before the Zagreb County Court due to a change of the panel of judges.

Without revealing the identity of the accused, the appellate court said that the circumstances that constituted the basis for the existing Supreme Court decision assigning the case to the Zagreb County Court had not changed, citing in that context, among other things, the status of witnesses in war crimes cases.

The court also dismissed Glavas’ allegations that the retrial before the Osijek County Court would be more economical, noting that such concerns were not of primary importance in the case.

Citing the law on the application of the statute of the International Criminal Court and rules on the prosecution of crimes against international humanitarian law, the Supreme Court said that Croatia has the obligation to prosecute war crimes and ensure appropriate conditions for such trials.

It has done so by assigning the case regarding war crimes in Osijek to the Zagreb County Court ad it must ensure such conditions also for the retrial, the Supreme Court said.

A former head of Osijek-Baranja County, one of the founders of the HDZ party and wartime head of the Osijek defence secretariat, and later a founder and MP of the HDSSB party, Glavas has from the outset denied accusations of involvement in the abuse, torture and killing of Osijek Serbs.

The previous trial in the case was scheduled after the Supreme Court in early January 2020 quashed a Zagreb County Court ruling of March 2019 under which the retrial of Glavas was to be separated from proceedings against his co-defendants.

In the initial trial Glavas and the other accused were sentenced to long prison terms but the final verdict was quashed by the Constitutional Court. By that time, Glavas had served most of his eight-year term in prisons in Bosnia and Herzegovina where he fled before the announcement of the trial court verdict.

In June 2019 Glavaš sued Krunoslav Fehir for the murder of Cedomir Vuckovic, and the county prosecutor’s office dismissed the case in July 2020, noting that an expert witness report included in the criminal report filed by Glavas was made by a national of Serbia and as such was not valid in Croatia.

During the original trial, Fehir was the key witness for the prosecution since as a 16-year-old in August 1991, as a member of the so-called Branimir Battalion, he witnessed Vuckovic being tortured in a garage in Osijek.

In the previous retrial, Fehir no longer had the status of key witness but was an ordinary witness. Glavas said Fehir’s testimony was false and reported him for killing Vuckovic but his report was dismissed, which prompted Fehir to file a criminal report against Glavas for falsely incriminating him.