The attorney for Josip Boljkovac, charged according to command responsibility with the killing of 21 civilians in May 1945 in the area of Karlovac, has asked the Constitutional Court to quash decisions to launch an investigation into Boljkovac and place him in custody, claiming that the decisions were made by bodies which did not have the authority to do it.
Attorney Anto Nobilo believes that the prosecution of the former high-ranking official of the Yugoslav communist security agency OZNA and Croatia's first interior minister should have been conducted in line with the current Criminal Procedure Act instead of the old law.
Nobilo told Hina earlier that the investigation into Boljkovac should have been conducted by the State Prosecutor's Office and not the court.
In his complaint to the Constitutional Court, Nobilo explains that the case should have been dealt with in line with the new Criminal Procedure Act because before its entry into force no criminal proceedings were conducted against Boljkovac, and investigative activities were conducted against "an unknown perpetrator".
"Expanding the criminal proceedings to include the stage before the launching of the investigation, namely investigative activities against an unknown perpetrator, will result in a situation where we will be launching investigations, for years to come, based on numerous exhumations and other investigative activities against unidentified perpetrators, in line with the old Criminal Procedure Act, and we will have two parallel criminal procedure systems in use," said Nobilo.
Nobilo believes that Boljkovac would still be free if the new Criminal Procedure Act was applied to his case because the new legal regulations on custody are far more restrictive than the old ones.
Applying the old legislation to his case puts Boljkovac in an unequal position in relation to all other citizens and decisions on the investigation against him and his detention violate the constitutional principle of the rule of law, says Nobilo.
The 91-year-old Boljkovac was arrested on November 4 on suspicion of ordering the execution of 21 civilians in May 1945 at the Vidanka-Curak location near Karlovac, when he was a senior OZNA official. He dismissed the accusations before an investigating judge and was placed in one month's detention because of the gravity of the charges. After the defence appealed, the judge's decisions were upheld by a Zagreb County Court panel of judges.
Due to his old age and poor health Boljkovac is not in Zagreb's Remetinec prison but in the prison hospital.
