Croatian Administration Minister Davorin Mlakar on Wednesday called on members of the parliament to adopt a declaration regulating some aspects of cooperation between Croatian and Serbian judicial authorities and describing Serbia's decision to expand its jurisdiction to Croatia as unacceptable.
The document calls on Serbia to accede to solving outstanding issues through an inter-state agreement.
Mlakar told the parliament (Sabor) that the government had proposed the adoption of the declaration, being aware that internal legislation could not completely settle outstanding issues between Serbia and Croatia pertaining to war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
According to him, the declaration sends out a clear message that Croatia finds it unacceptable that Serbia has a law which authorises the Serbian judiciary to conduct proceedings for war crimes in the entire area of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), expanding its jurisdiction onto other countries.
Such decision on Serbia's part is in contravention of the agreement signed by the Croatian and Serbian judicial authorities, the minister said.
There are no grounds for expanding the jurisdiction, he added, recalling that international documents, including United Nations resolutions, showed that the former SFRY ceased to exist in 1992 and that none of the former Yugoslav republics was the exclusive successor to the former SFRY and could base its legal acts on the former SFRY acts.
