A year has passed since the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Zorica Jovanović v. Serbia, the mother of the missing baby, became final. This is exactly how much time that court gave the Serbian authorities to take all the necessary measures to establish mechanisms that would give answers to the question of what really happened to the children to all parents who suspect that their children were kidnapped and given to someone for adoption. The court also recommended that a special law be passed for this reason, as well as that Zorica Jovanović (as well as the parents of the other children) be paid ten thousand euros in non-material damages due to the suffering suffered, as well as the costs of the proceedings.
Only after that deadline had passed, the authorities announced themselves with a message that can be defined: it will happen, and when it will happen, we don't know, so we are waiting for the ministries (of health and justice) to get started, as well as the others, to do what they are supposed to do. court ordered. Even a year after the verdict, that problem was not at all important to the authorities: this is evidenced by the fact that, just as the international court ordered, a group of professors and lawyers (Prof. Dr. Vesna Rakić Vodinelić, Danilo Ćurčić, Prof. Dr. Vladimir Vodinelić and Prof. Saša Gajin, Ph.D.) drafted the draft law, which has been collecting dust in a drawer for months (families are currently collecting signatures for a petition to enter the legislative procedure).
Neither did the engagement of the Ombudsman Saša Janković (who, among the few, has been dealing with this issue for years), just as the work of the Inquiry Committee of the Assembly of Serbia ten years ago did not bring any results; that committee concluded in 2006 that there were serious failures in the work of health institutions, registry offices and relevant ministries that justifiably caused parents to doubt the truth of the facts communicated to them that their children died after childbirth, that is, that they were stillborn. The committee also proposed some measures, then a Working Group was established, which mostly rejected all these measures as unnecessary, including the one to form a specialized unit of the Ministry of Interior to investigate cases, and to establish the jurisdiction of a special court and prosecutor's office to fight against organized crime. crime, and to remove the statute of limitations of criminal prosecution by amending the relevant laws...
JOVANOVIC AGAINST SERBIA: Then nothing happened for years, until the referral of Zorica Jovanović to the International Court of Human Rights: on October 28, 1983, she gave birth to a healthy boy in the Clinical Center in Ćuprija and had regular contact with him until October 30 of that year, when she the doctor announced that the next day she and her son would be discharged home. The next morning, the doctor on duty informed her that "her baby died". She immediately ran down the corridor towards the children's room, but was physically prevented from entering, the nurse even tried to give her an injection with sedatives. In shock, she left the maternity hospital, only to be told later that the autopsy of the newborn would be performed in Belgrade, and that for this reason the body was not handed over to the family.
Years later, when the story of the missing babies reached the public, Zorica Jovanović asked the Clinical Center in Ćuprija for documents about the death of her baby, and received information from the hospital that her son died on October 31, 1983 at 7.15:45 a.m. (XNUMX minutes after she was actually informed of his death), that the cause of death is unknown, and that there is no other information, because the archive was flooded and many documents were destroyed. However, the birth of her son, as informed by the municipal administration, was registered in the registers - the death was not! - and the competent public prosecutor rejected the criminal charges against the medical staff of the maternity hospital regardless.
The scale of the problem, as stated recently by Verica Cekić in "Večernji novosti", representative of 83 families who are looking for missing children, is told by the data. From 1956 until today, around three thousand families are still searching for children who, as they claim, were first declared dead, and then given up for adoption with new documentation. "It was done in the same way: a few days after the birth of a healthy baby, the parents were informed that the newborn had died, and they could not get any other information." This was noticed by the court in Strasbourg, which stated that the mothers were not allowed to see the baby's body, that the cause of death was never established, and that it was never officially recorded that the child had died," she said.
The data presented by the non-governmental organization ASTRA and the Belgrade parents of missing babies at a press conference in May is also indicative: as many as 62 percent of the calls to the European number for missing children (116.000) made by Serbian citizens refer to the problem of missing babies, while in in other European countries, between 80 and 90 percent of citizens report it because of children who have run away from home. "These are calls sent by mothers who were delivered by the same doctors, parents who were not allowed to bury their child, who received an official document from the JKP Pogrebno confirming that their babies were not buried..." said Elena Krsmanović from ASTRA at the time, while The Belgrade group of parents of missing children, which represents parents all over Serbia, claims that there is a well-founded suspicion that, under the pretext that the child was stillborn, 6000 families were separated from their babies.
PARENTAL QUESTIONS: Ten days ago, that group of parents addressed the public with a statement, in which they say that not even a year after the verdict in the case of Zorica Jovanović, the state authorities have not only established the exact number of parents who are looking for the truth about their children who disappeared from the maternity hospital, but have not made an effort to bring a special law with the help of which the truth could finally be reached. And not only that, they say, the authorities persistently and fiercely defend the indefensible: "The time has come for the truth to come out, no matter how hard they tried to hide and minimize it." For the sake of the public, we will ask questions to which we all have no answers, except for the state authorities", they say and ask: "Why was the Working Group formed at the Ministry of Health, and not an independent body as stated in the judgment, why was the Ministry of Health appointed to implement the judgment of the International Court of Justice, and not the Ministry of Justice, why did it take a full six months for the Working Group to be formed and are the results of the Working Group's work known, if any, why does the Working Group refuse to meet and cooperate with parents' representatives despite several written addresses, why does the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia refuses to assumes his share of responsibility for this problem and does not want to receive parents' representatives, why the prime minister and the Government of Serbia do not want or will not receive parents even after dozens of addresses, does the prime minister have an obligation to speak out on this issue and thereby help in the fight against of organized crime, are there people in the Government of Serbia who are hiding letters from the Prime Minister, does the state have a serious intention to resolve this issue once and for all, or will we resolve the affair of the missing babies again before the International Court of Justice, who is responsible for such large omissions that the state the authorities did not fulfill the execution orders the judgments of the International Court of Justice, why the state authorities do not accept the help of the Belgrade group of parents who drafted the Bill for them and delivered it to several addresses, whether the Republic's Prosecutor's Office will respond ex officio (which, by the way, is an obligation) to newspaper reports that foreign citizens find their biological parents in Serbia where they were sold and thus finally open Pandora's box?"
Now we need to see if, after the deadline set by the European Court, the authorities will finally take all the appropriate measures (including a law that would prescribe a mechanism that will ensure individual satisfaction for all parents whose position is the same or sufficiently similar to that of Zorica Jovanović). and give an answer about the fate of each child. Some of the parents, by the way, have already rejected the possibility of receiving only monetary compensation from the state instead of an answer.
After all, in her analysis of the verdict "Jovanović v. Serbia" (peščanik.net), Professor Rakić Vodinelić said: "What is actually satisfaction here, the question is to what right, no matter how sophisticated, there is simply no answer. Is it satisfying to know that the child is alive and raised by someone else? What does it mean for that (now adult) child to know that his natural parent is someone else? What kind of country is able to not answer questions about the alleged, suspicious deaths of babies for dozens of years - all this in peacetime conditions, without severe natural disasters? I only have an answer to the last question: it is a criminal state."
