BELGRADE - Serbian Deputy War Crimes Prosecutor Bruno Vekaric announced that indictments against over 40 war crime suspects in cases Istok, Strpce and Srebrenica would be raised in the next few months.

The Serbian Prosecutor's Office has been working on the cases for three years now as these are very demanding procedures and cannot be completed within short periods of time like regular cases, Vekaric said on Tuesday at a gathering focusing on the war crime trials in Serbia in 2013.

The debate in Belgrade was organised by the Humanitarian Law Centre and USAID. The deputy prosecutor agreed with the assessments that the number of war crime indictments raised in 2013 was low, with only seven trials launched against 14 suspects, and pointed to the problems the Prosecutor's Office is facing.

Vekaric agreed with the criticism voiced by Humanitarian Law Centre Director Sandra Orlovic who said that the punitive policy is generally mild when it comes to war crimes, but he explained that the prosecution had to adjust to the new Code of Criminal Procedure and prosecutorial investigation standards in the past few years.

Head of the Rule of Law and Human Rights Department with the OSCE Mission in Serbia Romana Schweiger said that it is impossible to organise trials against everyone and added that resources should not be wasted and instead, the authorities need to focus on the most important cases.

Orlovic also voiced criticism against the Belgrade High Court and the Appellate Court over their mild punitive policy and the tendency to keep data anonymous, but she underscored that the procedure is the same in other countries in the region too.

High Court and the Appellate Court in Belgrade referred to the Law on Personal Data Protection and obscured the names of judges, lawyers and defendants. As the most obvious example of this, Orlovic listed the case against the Gnjilane group.

The Gnjilane group comprises members of the para-military ethnic Albanian forces in Kosovo-Metohija, the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, who were sentenced to a total of 116 years of imprisonment for aggravated torture, rape and robbery of the property of 80 Serb civilians and other non-Albanians in the territory of Gnjilane from June to December 1999.

In the appeal proceedings, the Appellate Court decided to acquit all the 11 defendants due to lack of evidence.