Lepoglava, (IKA) – At a scholarly meeting entitled Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac – A Witness of His Times and a Visionary for the Third Millennium, held on Friday, December 5, under the auspices of the diocese of Varaždin and the parish of Lepoglava, a statement was unanimously adopted urging the Government of the Republic of Croatia to sponsor an amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act or the Croatian Parliament to propose an amendment to Article 490, Paragraphs 3 and 4, of the Criminal Procedure Act, in order to launch a judicial review not only of the political proceedings against Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac but also the proceedings against over a hundred priests and patriots who lived and dreamed only one dream – a free Croatian state.
Furthermore, the symposium participants proposed the establishment of a legal-historical commission with the task of objectively and scientifically (sine ira et studio) rendering a legal-historical judgment on all the political proceedings from 1945 to 1990 on the soil of the former communist Yugoslavia. This would require not only the remembrance of the victims of these proceedings but also the entire Croatian public.
The statement emphasizes that the main topic of the symposium was whether the 1946 verdict against Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb, which was adopted by the Supreme Court of the National Republic of Croatia, should be considered valid and legally founded today. At the first session of the Croatian Parliament on February 14, 1992, the Declaration on the Condemnation of the Political Proceedings and Verdict against Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac was issued, in which it was concluded “that Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac was unjustly condemned, and therefore an injustice and insult were perpetrated against the Croatian nation,” and that “although the Croatian nation and the Catholic Church never recognized the verdict against Archbishop Stepinac, the Croatian Parliament, as the largest representative body of Croatia, by its explicitly clear attitude toward the unjust verdict against Cardinal Stepinac corrected a historical injustice.” However, pursuant to this ruling, the verdict of the Yugoslav court has still not been reversed. According to the generally accepted public opinion, especially among legal experts, the idea for the judicial review of the proceedings against the Blessed Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac has matured.
Such a possibility is anticipated by the provisions of Article 490 of the Criminal Procedure Act, which state that persons who were condemned by the courts of the former Yugoslavia during the communist regime for political crimes, politically motivated crimes or other crimes, if the verdicts were issued due to the abuse of political power, may petition for the reversal of rulings or some other suitable legal act. However, since the provisions of this article of the law stipulated a period of two years for the initiation of the judicial reviews of all the verdicts adopted in political proceedings on the soil of the former communist Yugoslavia, the deadline expired on December 31, 2000, so that judicial review is no longer possible. Since a “sin of omission” has been committed and up to the present there has been no judicial review of the proceedings against Archbishop Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, a beatus of the Catholic Church, the symposium participants are of the opinion that the time is ripe for the historical injustice to be corrected, according to their statement. Eminent legal experts, including Dr. Željko Horvatić, professor emeritus of the University of Zagreb and president of the Academy of Legal Science, have taken the position that, since there is no statute of limitations on war crimes, there certainly should be no statute of limitations on the “crimes of injustice,” inflicted upon thousands of innocent Croatian patriots who were convicted and served prison sentences in Yugoslav prisons solely because “they thought differently.”
At the symposium in Lepoglava, held on the anniversary of the day 57 years ago when Archbishop Stepinac was transferred due to international pressure from the Lepoglava correctional facility, where he spent five years following a rigged trial conducted by the communist authorities, to house arrest in Krašić, where he later died, distinguished Croatian theologians, lawyers and other experts participated. At the beginning of the symposium, held in Stepinac’s jubilee year, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his beatification, the 110th anniversary of his birth and the 70th anniversary of the eucharistic congress he led in Varaždin, greetings were conveyed by Bishop Josip Mrzljak of Varaždin; the representative of the Croatian Parliament, Vladimir Šeks; and the representative of Archbishop Cardinal Josip Bozanić of Zagreb, Msgr. Juraj Batelja, postulator of the cause of the canonization of the Blessed Alojzije Stepinac.