Attorney Vucinic: I Have Applied for Judge Position, but Injustice Done to Me Hasn’t Been Corrected

Attorney Vladimir Vucinic (Foto: Nikola Todorovic)

Attorney Vladimir Vucinic, a former judge of the Special Court, whose ruling in “the Miskovic case” did not please the regime, has said that he has applied for judge position, the post he has discharged for more than 20 years, but has not been appointed although “it was an opportunity to correct a professional injustice done to me.”

“I have applied for a vacancy for the post of a judge at the Supreme Court of Cassation, published by the High Court Council. I believe that a person of my experience and resume can be of assistance, especially because I have only some ten years of work to meet all the retirement requirements. However, they believed that I was not good enough for them,” Vucinic has told BETA. He has several years severed as the president of the Special department for organized crime, known as the Special Court, and also as the deputy president of the Higher Court in Belgrade.

“I congratulate the selected candidates and I want to believe that the entire procedure was objective. I tried, they were given a chance to, as I wrote in the application, to correct a professional injustice,” Vucinic said, adding that applicants who were not selected have not been provided any explanation.

Vucinic became known to broader public when he came under the regime’s attack after ruling, as the chamber presiding judge, that passport be returned for a short period of time to businessman Miroslav Miskovic, who was then tried before court. After this case, Vucinic against his will and due to numerous problems started working as a lawyer, which he has described in detail in his recently published book titled “Under Pressure.”  

“A society invests for years in a person to become a good judge, which also applies for experts in other fields. And then in most cases unfortunately, the best among us, although I do not regard myself as one of them, are discarded by the same system as “a foreign body,” without justified reasons,” Vucinic specified. He added that a judge can be discharged not for making a mistake, but over a trivial ruling, which would only be a cause, while “the real reason is that such a decision is not politically favorable to someone, which of course, must not happen."