Ombudsman: Omissions of Competent Services in This Year’s 12 Cases of Murders of Women
Control of actions of the state services in the cases of 14 women murdered since the beginning of the year established that in as many as in 12 of them there were omissions in their work, ombudsman Sasa Jankovic said on Thursday.
Jankovic specially stressed this month’s case that took place in the Vojvodina village of Zitiste where a jealous man killed his ex-wife and four more people, and wounded over 20 of them by indiscriminately shooting from an automatic rifle in a restaurant.
There were omissions because the center for social work failed to respond to earlier reports of domestic violence, Jankovic said.
Previously, Minister of Labor and Social Policy in the technical government Aleksandar Vulin claimed there had been no omissions in the work of the centre for social work.
“It does not mean that anyone else but the murderer is to blame for someone’s death, but if these omissions did not occur the possibility of the deadly outcome would have been reduced”, Jankovic said.
He said he forwarded 45 recommendations related to the monitoring of domestic violence cases to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Labor and Social Policy and to the Ministry of Health.
“It is not that our laws are bad, but the fundamental problem is failure to implement the regulations and irresponsibility. The omissions are often covered up”, he said.
Jankovic said that a survey that covers the period from June 2013 to June 2014 showed there were altogether 5,352 criminal reports that the police filed for domestic violence and that 4,399 of them were related to the violence against women.
“In 71 percent of the cases, these charges ended by a verbal warning to bullies, and only 25 percent of criminal reports reached the stage of filing an indictment”, Jankovic.
Jankovic “did not read all minutes”, Vulin replies: Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Issues would consider all comments of ombudsman, but he still claimed that no one addressed the Center for Social Issues before the murder in Zitiste with report of violence, Vulin said on Thursday.
He said that Jankovic “did not very precisely read all minutes and all that he received” regarding this case, which attracted a lot of attention in public and which was reported in foreign media due to gravity of the crime.
“We will always support improvements in our work and we will address the public with integral minutes, in a way that this has been presented to me and authorities. And Jankovic, if he did not happen to see those, would be able to see them at the same time as public; as far as I am concerned, immediately”, Vulin said.
