Croatian President Zoran Milanovic has invalidated former President Ivo Josipovic's decision on stripping wartime Osijek official, general Branimir Glavas, of war medals, since Glavas's convictions were quashed and the retrials were ordered.

Glavas’s son, lawyer Filip Glavas, told Hina on Saturday, that the return of the seven war medals to his father were the only logical and fair decision as his father had no longer the status of a convict.

Milanović’s decision on declaring null and void Josipovic’s decision was published in the Official Gazette after it had been adopted on 21 May on the advice of the state commission for decorations and awards and in line with the Constitution and the relevant legislation.

The commission took into consideration the changes in the trials in the cases dubbed ‘Garage’ and ‘Duct tape’ for the war crimes against local Serbs in the eastern Croatian city of Osijek in the early 1990s.

Lawyer Filip Glavas said today that the reasons such as the final convictions for stripping his father of war decorations had not existed for some time and that in 2019, they had asked the then president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic to return the decoration to his father.

However, she ignored our request, the lawyer Filip Glavas told Hina.

A month ago we sent the request to this effect to President Zoran Milanovic, and he granted our request, which is the only fair and logical decision considering the fact that the Constitutional and Supreme Courts quashed the convictions, he said.

The Supreme Court quashed the trial court verdict on 28 July 2016 and requested the Zagreb County Court to hold a new trial in this case.

In the initial trial which lasted from October 2007 to April 2009, Glavas and the other accused were sentenced to lengthy prison terms but the final verdict was quashed by the Supreme 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 late November 2019, Glavas, who was still standing trial for war crimes, supported in Osijek with his signature Milanovic’s presidential candidacy, saying that his signature “is not a signature for the SDP or for drawing closer to the SDP but for Milanovic as a candidate for the president of the republic”, while members of his HDSSB party would decide for themselves whose presidential bid to support.

Later that day, Milanovic, who was the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate for the Croatian president, said that he distanced himself from the support expressed for his presidential bid by member of parliament and HDSSB party leader Branimir Glavas.

“I would like to distance myself from his support because Glavas is not my kind of people. I think that (his support) is a message to (PM Andrej) Plenkovic. The man has been indicted for grave war crimes and the court is expected to make a ruling. The biggest problem about it is that the trial is taking too long, considering that the events in question happened in Osijek in 1991. That is something that I, as the future president, will change if I can, by statements and by exerting pressure at least. The case is still under way and that’s not how the judiciary should work,” Milanovic said then during his presidential campaign.