Source: N1
The executive director of “Civil Initiatives”, Maja Stojanović, stated that there are judges and prosecutors who will not tolerate pressure and many arrests that are clearly outside the law. “It seems that it is clear to everyone that there is enough political influence, whether it is happening in Belgrade or in the courts throughout Serbia,” believes Stojanović.
In the program Novi dan on N1, Stojanović commented on the hearings of persons detained in Uzice, among them councilor Radovan Novaković, who was taken away in handcuffs by the police this morning, and the people gathered in front of the court in Uzice greeted him with applause and shouts.
“Detention should not be determined, and we have a tendency to determine it politically, regardless of whether there are legal grounds or not. The question is whether they should have been detained for up to 48 hours,” she said.
As she said, the most blatant example of political influence is with the judge in the previous proceedings, recalling that some of them announced on March 14 that they would no longer approve plea agreements in the previous proceedings because, as Stojanović states, the question arises as to whether someone was forced to plead guilty just to be released.
Right after Vidovdan, he says, we had judges who refused to work according to that agreement, but the chief prosecutor of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade, Nenad Stefanović, brought in judges who approved such agreements.
According to her, there is evident political pressure on the police, who, as she says, receive some kind of quota every day as to how many people they should arrest and in what way.
“Coordinated and politically controlled police work generally works by arresting people in order to get them off the streets,” says Stojanović.
He believes that what the government is doing is counterproductive.
“Do they not have a way to deal with it, but it is definitely not calming down the struggle of both students and citizens. When he moves from Belgrade, we can see how organic that struggle is,” believes Maja Stojanović.