While I was having my morning coffee at the hotel, I browsed through today’s issue of the leading local newspaper, Glas Istre (The Voice of Istria). An article dealing with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg attracted most of my attention. Although I skimmed most of it, I read some parts of it with due care. Apparently, the number of cases that come to the court is disproportional to the size of the country. One of the Croatian judges currently in Strasbourg, Ksenija Turković, says that more than twelve-thousand cases from Croatia have come to the court thus far. Out of these, more than eight-thousand were rejected by the court because they had nothing to do with human rights.

Peđa Grbin, who leads one of the bodies concerned with constitutional issues in the Croatian parliament, is quoted as saying that “Strasbourg” has become a common word in Croatia. He has nothing to say about the reason for this linguistic peculiarity, though. Jasna Omejec, the head of the Croatian Constitutional Court is also quoted about the propensity of Croatian citizens to put their last hope in Strasbourg, but I could not figure out what she was getting at. In the end, none of the people interviewed suggested that the importance of Strasbourg in Croatia only shows how poorly the judicial system in the country actually works. People thus put all their hopes in a court out of the reach of Croatian judges, many of whom are seen as pawns of their political masters.

I could not but think of my own litigation, which is also liable to end up in Strasbourg. It has to do with political persecution in Croatia, where political opponents are taken to court if everything else fails to stop them. One way or another, my complaint against the three court cases lodged against me by Slobodan Vugrinec, the former mayor of Motovun, will surely fit Strasbourg’s remit. And all three cases came my way just ahead of municipal elections in 2009. If this is not about human rights, I have no idea what is. Once again, my hope in Strasbourg only shows how little I trust the Croatian judiciary, which is squarely in the hands of the political establishment ever since Croatia’s independence. As for Glas Istre, it is nothing but a political newspaper, as well. The Istrian Democratic Assembly, the party that has the Istrian peninsula in its tight embrace since independence, is undoubtedly behind it.