Supreme Public Prosecutor: Chief Belgrade Prosecutor Created His Own Shadow Organization

Branko Stamenković (BETAPHOTO/MILAN OBRADOVIC)

Belgrade’s chief public prosecutor, Nenad Stefanovic, had “full political support” from the outgoing regime, which allowed him to create his own “parallel prosecutorial organization” unfettered by legal constraints, said Branko Stamenkovic, a prosecutor of the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office.

According to the first audit report received by the special committee for investigating the operation of every prosecutor’s office in the country, Belgrade Chief Prosecutor Stefanovic’s para-organization was accountable to no one and operated without concern for legal hierarchy or legality in general,” Stamenkovic told the Nov. 12 edition of the Vreme weekly.

The rule of law, Stamenkovic stated, finally “collapsed” once the police began refusing to proceed according to orders issued by prosecutors outside of Stefanovic’s control.

“Obstruction is actually a mild label for what [those other] public prosecutor’s offices were faced with,” Stamenkovic explained adding that “lack of cooperation with public prosecutor’s offices, particularly the Supreme Office, over the past two and likely even three years, amounted to isolating the Supreme and some other public prosecutor’s offices which, in [his office’s] estimate, operated professionally and fully in accordance with the Constitution and law.”

Stamenkovic went on to say that the auditing committee has so far also determined that Prosecutor Miodrag Markovic and others acted illegally in the so-called ‘Sound Cannon Case,’ i.e. the March 15, 2025 deployment of an illegal sonic weapon against peaceful protestors during a massive anti-regime rally in downtown Belgrade.

This first auditing report is one of many to come, which will ultimately be combined into a single, comprehensive analysis of the current state and last few years of operation of Serbia’s prosecutorial offices.