UK to Decide on Croatian Extradition Request

A new extradition hearing was held in London this week for Milan Spanovic, a Croatian Serb convicted of war crimes in absentia by a court in Croatia and sentenced to 20 years in prison.



Spanovic, 43, has been living in London for the last 15 years. The Zagreb authorities learnt of his whereabouts after he was arrested for shoplifting on June 13.



The crimes he was charged with included torturing - and shooting at - civilians and plundering and setting fire to civilian and religious facilities in the Glina area in 1991.



Croatia has asked for his extradition, but Spanovic claims that he is a refugee under British law and has repeatedly demanded asylum.



The latest extradition hearing was held on January 25 at the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.



Spanovic’s lawyer Julian Atlee told the court that issues relating to his client’s identity, human rights and the passage of time between the initial indictment against him and the extradition request had to be addressed before a decision could be made as to whether he should be extradited.



The lawyer explained there appeared to be another person called Milan Spanovic, who had been a policeman in the village of Rajic, and who fits the description of the person sought by the Croatian government.



“The question of identity needs to be revisited; enquiries need to be made,” said Atlee at the extradition hearing.



Questioned by Adina Ezekiel, acting on behalf of the Croatian government, Spanovic said that in 1991 he had been a member of the Yugoslav National Army and subsequently the army of the self-proclaimed Serb Autonomous Region, SAO Krajina.



He said he was conscripted into both armies.



Ezekiel asked Spanovic his date of birth and confirmed that this matched the description of the person sought by Croatia.



The judge hearing the case, Timothy Workman said he was “satisfied at this stage that the person being sought is the person before me.”



Ezekiel also challenged Spanovic’s claims that he was involuntarily drafted in the SAO Krajina army, pointing to his previous statement in which he said, “I took part in the rebellion because I sincerely believed that it was the intention of [the Croatian president] Franjo Tudjman to remove the Serb population from Croatia.”



On the question of whether the human rights of the Serb minority in Croatia were adequately protected for Spanovic to be extradited there, his lawyer referred to a recent report by Human Rights Watch.



He said the report was at odds with a 2003 European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, judgment in the Tomic versus United Kingdom case, which stated that the problem of discrimination against ethnic Serbs had been sufficiently dealt with in Croatia.



Milovan Tomic, a Serb from Eastern Slavonia, applied for asylum in the UK in 2002, complaining that due to his past military service as an officer with a Serb paramilitary group involved in the conflict, he would be at risk of retributive action. However, the UK rejected his application and this was upheld in 2003 by the ECHR, which said that the position of Serbs in Croatia, including those who were ex-combatants, was not sufficiently unsafe as to warrant his not being returned to Croatia.



Atlee disputed this 2003 ECHR judgment, and said he had heard the situation of Serbs in Croatia had worsened following recent elections in Serbia, in which the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party emerged as the most popular party in this country.



Ezekiel countered that elections in a neighbouring state could have little relevance to the situation in Croatia.



Atlee also said that the time delay between the initial indictment against Spanovic in 1993 and the 2006 request that he be extradited from the UK further weakened the grounds for extraditing him.



He said that the Croatian government had been given ample opportunity to seek to try Spanovic but had declined to do so.



Spanovic, who denies committing war crimes, said that he remained in Croatia until 1995 when the Serbs in SAO Krajina were expelled. After that, he went to Serbia, but soon returned to the part of Eastern Croatia that was under United Nations control from 1995 to 1998.



He said that during this time he was issued with a Croatian passport and repeatedly crossed the border between Croatia and Serbia, without being hindered by the Croatian authorities.



Spanovic said he first learned that he had been sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1998 when his cousin, also called Milan Spanovic - but not the one who lived in Rajic and was a policeman - returned to Glina and was arrested and beaten by Croatian police.



Spanovic said his cousin was released soon after the police realised they had the wrong Milan Spanovic.



Spanovic, the defendant, said he had not known what he had been sentenced for, but fled to the United Kingdom when his cousin told him about the judgment.



Spanovic said he immediately applied for asylum when he arrived in the UK in 1998, telling the authorities about the judgment against him, and was given Indefinite Leave to Remain, ILR.



He said that he first became aware that the judgment against him related to war crimes when he saw it on the internet in 2000, but remained in contact with the Croatian embassy, visiting it between 10 and 15 times between 2001 and 2006 when he applied for Croatian passports for his two sons and dealt with legal matters relating to his property in Croatia.



Atlee said that Spanovic’s frequent contact with the Croatian authorities after 1995 demonstrated that they must have been aware of his whereabouts and that he had not sought to hide from them.



“The country of his birth has permitted him to establish a new life in this country; they knew where he was and did nothing to terminate his residence,” said Atlee.



However, Ezekiel said that the region where Spanovic lived from 1995 to 1998 was not under Croatian government control at that time - it was run by the United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia - and that his visits to the Croatian embassy in London would not necessarily have made his whereabouts known to the Croatian government.



Presenting further arguments against Spanovic being extradited to Croatia, Atlee said that his in absentia trial had relied on unreliable hearsay evidence, which may also be the case in the retrial to which he is entitled under Croatian law.



However, Ezekiel said that the retrial was unlikely to rely only on hearsay evidence and that Spanovic said he knew many people in his home village in Croatia, which could appear as defence witnesses.



Judge Workman adjourned the hearing and asked Atlee to collect further evidence related to the issues discussed in time for the next hearing on March 5. He added he would then consider all the evidence and present this to the home secretary who would decide whether Spanovic is to be extradited.



Rory Gallivan is a London-based journalist.