The President of the Republic of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić, has appointed Judge of the Appellate Court in Belgrade Siniša Važić his personal envoy to the RECOM’s Regional Expert Group. Croatian President Ivo Josipović appointed Zlata Đurđević, Professor at the Faculty of Law of University of Zagreb, as his personal envoy to RECOM; Macedonian President Gjorgje Ivanov appointed Luben Arnaudoski, Deputy General Secretary for Legal and Organizational Affairs at the Office of the Macedonian President; Montenegrin President Filip Vujanović appointed Dean of the Faculty of Law in Podgorica and his personal Adviser on Minority and Human Rights, Sonja Tomović-Šundić; Kosovo President Atifete Jahjaga appointed her personal Legal Adviser Selim Selimi; Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bakir Izetbegović appointed Deputy Mayor of Sarajevo Aljoša Čampara; Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Željko Komšić appointed Goran Mihaljević, a legal expert on cooperation with the Hague tribunal. No personal envoys have been appointed by the third Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nebojša Radmanović, and Slovenian President Borut Pahor.
The first meeting of RECOM’s Regional Expert Group will take place in Zagreb on 6 September 2013. By appointing their personal envoys, the presidents of the post-Yugoslav countries have ushered in a new phase of the RECOM Process involving the transference of the RECOM Initiative from a civil to a political level. Participants in the first meeting will consider constitutional possibilities for establishing a regional non-judicial commission for determining facts about war crimes and other serious violations of human rights committed during the armed conflicts and shortly after the cessation of the wars in the territory of the former SFRY.
The Coalition for RECOM, which brings together about 2,000 nongovernmental organizations, victims’ associations, families of missing persons and individuals from all post-Yugoslav countries, campaigns for drawing up a victims’ name list as a precondition for reconciliation and non-repetition of war crimes.
