Eurasia Press & News
Can Montenegro succeed where its Balkan peers failed in conducting a fair process of lustration? Not likely, say analysts and experts.
Montenegro’s new coalition government is promising a law on lustration to weed out public officials guilty of past human rights violations, but political analysts and legal experts say it faces considerable constitutional and political barriers
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago, a host of eastern European states have passed laws designed to bar from public life those associated with rights violations under their former communist regimes, particularly members of the security apparatuses and their informants.
There have been attempts to do the same in the former Yugoslavia, yielding more controversy than real success.
Now Montenegro’s new government, which took power this month and ended three decades of uninterrupted rule by the Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, says it too wants to hold to account those responsible for rights violations, including former officials of or collaborators with the Yugoslav-era intelligence service known as UDBA.
On December 3, Deputy Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic told Montenegrin TV Vijesti that the country needed a process of lustration in order to come to terms with its past. He denied it would be used to exact revenge on the DPS, which was formed in 1991 as the successor party to the Montenegrin League of Communists. “The law must prescribe acts for which one can be lustrated and the list of officials who must be lustrated,” Abazovic said. “So far, such a law is not ready. We have no common idea what it should look like.” But analysts and experts are not convinced.
“There are no successful stories of lustration in the countries of the region, so I’m not sure that this process is feasible in Montenegro,” said Boris Raonic, executive director of the Podgorica-based NGO Civic Alliance.
“People who were cooperating with the secret police should be excluded from public life,” he said, “but such process could be hard in Montenegro.”
“The forces that were against mass violations of human rights in the 1990s are still a minority in the country and the parliamentary majority is not stable enough for such a process,” Raonic told BIRN.
Little lustration success in the Balkans
Montenegro will struggle to take inspiration from any of its Western Balkan peers. In Serbia, the Law on Liability for Human Rights Violations was adopted in 2001 following the fall of strongman Slobodan Milosevic, but it was never implemented.
In North Macedonia, a Lustration Commission began working in 2009 but was accused by opposition parties and rights groups of simply targeting critics of the then ruling VMRO-DPMNE.
After criticism from the European Union, the Commission announced in 2015 that it would start winding down. But it upheld sanctions imposed on more than 200 ‘lustrated’ persons, including a ban on anyone declared a collaborator with the former secret police from working in a state institution.
The country’s Administrative Court has since annulled dozens of rulings by the Commission while a number of former communist officials have complained to the European Court of Human Rights and won.
In Albania, despite an opposition boycott of parliament and the misgivings of Brussels, a law on lustration was adopted in 2008, banning from public service anyone deemed linked to the former ‘Sigurimi’ secret police from November 1944 to December 1990.
Critics of the law said it was unconstitutional since it gave a special commission the power to fire judges and prosecutors who served under the former communist regime without due process in courts.
Abazovic’s Black on White alliance, however, said a Montenegrin lustration law was not about exacting revenge.
“This purpose of this law must not be revenge but the establishment of democracy,” Black on White MP Filip Adzic told BIRN. “The public has the right to know who is unworthy of performing public functions.”
The government, however, is a coalition of four very different blocs, brought together by the common goal of unseating the DPS.
Nebojsa Medojevic, an MP with the co-ruling Democratic Front, said the promise of a law on lustration was “just political marketing.” He argued the government should first seek to open secret service files.
“We must dismantle a totalitarian regime,” he said. “We must publish the names of people connected to the secret service and exclude them from public life.” “Unfortunately,” Medojevic argued, “this government is not capable of starting the process because of the lack of political will.”
Constitutional obstacles
A previous attempt to pass such a law, instigated by the opposition Liberal Party, in 2006, collapsed after failing to win sufficient support in parliament.
But while the political hurdles are significant, it’s the constitution that could really derail the government’s plans, said Podgorica lawyer Velibor Markovic.
According to Article 45 of the Montenegrin Constitution, every citizen has the right to vote and be elected, while Article 62 guarantees the right to work and to the free choice of occupation. A ban on holding public office would violate both articles, Markovic said.
“If the parliament adopts the law, it risks rejection by the Constitutional Court or lawsuits before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg,” Markovic told BIRN.
“Therefore, the parliament would have to first change certain provisions of the Constitution that restrict the implementation of the lustration law.”
Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority in parliament, far more than the government currently holds with 41 of the assembly’s 80 seats.
“Because of the lack of support in parliament, for now it is difficult to expect the lustration process to be carried out in Montenegro,” said Markovic.
