JURIST - Paper Chase: Saturday, December 11, 2010

[JURIST] Croatian police on Friday arrested a former senior member of the nation's ruling party for alleged war crimes he committed against Serbian civilians in 1991 during the Serbo-Croatian war [GlobalSecurity backgrounder]. The arrest of former interior ministry official Tomislav Mercep comes just one day after Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] released a report [text, PDF; press release] criticizing Croatia's lack of political will, adequate laws and court system necessary to prosecute alleged war crimes. The report, "Behind a Wall of Silence: Prosecution of War Crimes in Croatia" called on the Croatian government to increase the rate at which war crimes trials are adjudicated in order to provide justice for victims and their families. The report also called for the prosecution of several top-level Croatian officials, including Mercep who has been accused over the past 15 years of ordering military units to kill and torture Serbian citizens during the Serbo-Croatian conflict. The previous allegations had never been fully investigated by any Croatian authority despite what AI called "publicly available evidence" against him. Nicola Duckworth, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at AI, praised the arrest [press release] calling it a "welcome development."

Also on Friday, former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader was arrested [JURIST report] in Austria pursuant to an arrest warrant issued by Croatia. Sanader, who was elected to parliament after he stepped down from the prime minister position in 2009, stands accused of corruption, abuse of power and fraud for taking nearly €4 million from public firms and state institutions [Croatian Times report]. Croatian officials have been under serious pressure to the tackle the issue of corruption in order to gain accession [EU materials] to the EU by 2012. The prosecution of individuals for organized crime and war crimes has been one of the major issues faced by Croatia in its accession process. In 2008, AI called on the EU to use Croatia's status as a candidate country to ensure that the Croatian government actively investigates and prosecutes [JURIST report] suspected war criminals. AI criticized the slow pace of war crimes investigations and noted that Croatian courts have mostly focused on crimes allegedly committed by ethnic Serbs. In March 2005, the EU suspended entry talks [JURIST report] on the grounds that Croatia was failing to fully cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [JURIST news archive] investigating war crimes in the area.

[JURIST] A German administrative court dismissed [press release, in German] a lawsuit filed by Khaled El-Masri [JURIST news archive] seeking the arrest and extradition of 13 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] agents whom El-Masri claims kidnapped and illegally detained him in 2003 as part of the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition [JURIST news archive] program, according to a ruling made public Friday. The Cologne Administrative Court [official website, in German] ruled Tuesday that the German Justice Ministry's decision not to pursue prosecution against the CIA agents, despite a previously issued [JURIST reports] arrest warrant, was legal. On orders from the US, in 2003, Macedonian authorities seized [Guardian report] El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, while he was traveling in Macedonia, and held him incommunicado for 23 days. He was then handed over to the CIA and transported to a secret detention facility in Afghanistan where he was held for four months in allegedly inhumane conditions, interrogated and abused. The German government decided against pursuing El-Masri's claims in 2007 after officials in Washington, DC, stated they would reject any attempts at extradition due to national security issues. El-Masri is currently serving a two-year prison sentence for an unrelated crime he committed in 2009, and has one month to decide whether to file an appeal [AP report].

In October, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) [official website] announced [JURIST report] that it will review the involvement [press release] of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) in the extraordinary rendition and torture of El-Masri by the CIA. The case against the FYROM is the first in which a government has been called before an international tribunal to explain its involvement in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. In May, a lawyer from the Spanish National Court Office of the Prosecutor petitioned [JURIST report] judge Ismael Moreno to issue arrest warrants for the 13 CIA agents who allegedly kidnapped El-Masri. The Office of the Prosecutor alleged that the court had jurisdiction to issue the warrants because the agents made a stop in Spanish territory using hidden identities without official Spanish government authorization to do so. In 2008, El-Masri petitioned [ACLU materials; JURIST report] the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) [official website] to open an investigation of human rights violations by the US, alleging that he was tortured by the CIA. In 2007, the US Supreme Court rejected [JURIST report] without comment El-Masri's petition for certiorari, ostensibly supporting the Bush administration's contention that allowing El-Masri's federal lawsuit to proceed would require the revelation of state secrets.

[JURIST] Former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader was arrested in Austria on Friday pursuant to an arrest warrant issued by Croatia. Sanader, who was elected to parliament after he stepped down from the prime minister position in 2009, stands accused of corruption, abuse of power and fraud for taking nearly €4 million from public firms and state institutions [Croatian Times report]. Those charges were filed against the former official after the Croatian parliament voted to rescind his immunity from prosecution [AFP report], to which he was entitled as a member of parliament. Sanader had left Croatia immediately before that vote [BBC report], leading to speculation that he was fleeing from possible prosecution. An Austrian judge has ordered that Sanader be held for two weeks in Austria pending his extradition to Croatia.

Croatian officials have been under serious pressure to the tackle the issue of corruption in order to gain accession [EU materials] to the EU by 2012. The prosecution of individuals for organized crime and war crimes has been one of the major issues faced by Croatia in its accession process. In 2008, Amnesty International called on the EU to use Croatia's status as a candidate country to ensure that the Croatian government actively investigates and prosecutes [JURIST report] suspected war criminals. AI criticized the slow pace of war crimes investigations and noted that Croatian courts have mostly focused on crimes allegedly committed by ethnic Serbs. In March 2005, the EU suspended entry talks [JURIST report] on the grounds that Croatia was failing to fully cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [JURIST news archive] investigating war crimes in the area.

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website; JURIST news archive] on Friday granted certiorari [order, PDF] in three cases related to the duty of generic drug manufacturers to list possible side effects on the labels of medicines they produce. The three cases, PLIVA Inc. v. Mensing [docket; cert. petition, PDF], Actavis v. Mensing [docket; cert. petition, PDF] and Actavis v. Demahy [docket; cert. petition, PDF] were consolidated and will receive one hour of oral argument time. In each of the three cases, the drug manufacturers sought review after appellate courts ruled that the plaintiffs' cases could move forward and that federal law did not preempt their state law claims. Both plaintiffs suffered a neurologic side effect, tardive dyskinesia [NIH backgrounder], from their use of the generic drug metoclopramide to treat gastric reflux.

These consolidated cases will answer a question that the Supreme Court left open when it decided Wyeth v. Levine [JURIST report] in 2009—namely, is state law preempted in drug labeling cases when the drug is a generic, rather than name-brand medication. In the Wyeth decision, the court held that manufacturers of name-brand medicines bear primary responsibility for product labeling, and that the silence of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act [text] on the issue of preemption was sufficient proof that Congress did not contemplate preemption in medication labeling. The court stated that manufacturers may themselves initiate strengthened warning labels to comply with state and federal requirements. The court's decision in Wyeth upheld a Vermont Supreme Court's affirmance of a $6.7 million jury award for the plaintiff.