Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković arrived at the trial in the building of the Special Court on Ustanička Street accompanied by the defendant Slavica Jelača, a secretary at the Ministry of Culture, and Goran Vasić, acting director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. As a reminder, both Jelača and Vasić identified Minister Selaković as the person on whose orders they acted during the procedure of removing cultural heritage protection from the “Generalštab” building complex.
Selaković is accused that, in the period from the second half of May until the end of November 2024, together with Slavica Jelača, Goran Vasić, and Aleksandar Ivanović, acting director of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade, exceeded the limits of his official authority and knowingly participated in a procedure that, according to the prosecution, caused serious damage to Serbia’s cultural heritage.
Although they were legally obliged to protect cultural assets, the defendants, according to the indictment proposal, undertook actions aimed at revoking the protected status of the General Staff buildings, knowing that the legal conditions for such a decision had not been met.
In that process, as Goran Vasić previously stated during questioning at the prosecutor’s office, he acted on the orders of Minister of Culture Selaković. He pleaded guilty before the prosecution, saying that he did not dispute that he himself drafted the act “Initiative: proposal for adopting a decision on the termination of cultural property status,” that he did not know it should be publicly announced, and that he believed he had the right to do so. He personally handed the initiative, by hand, to Slavica Jelača, who initialed the copy he kept for himself in the upper right corner of the document and, as he stated, he mistakenly took it to his apartment, where the police found it.
On the other hand, Jelača, according to the indictment proposal, upon the order of Minister Selaković, took over further actions, even though she was not competent for these cases. Without authorization and professional basis, she drafted proposals for government decisions and included in the explanations information that did not correspond to the factual situation, stating that the competent institutes had submitted reasoned proposals, although that was not the case.
In the period from July 10 to July 17, 2024, Jelača prepared correspondence from the Ministry of Culture to other state institutions, and all of those documents were signed by Minister Nikola Selaković using a facsimile.
The proposals were then, on July 17, forwarded to the Government of the Republic of Serbia for decision-making.
Before the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime, Jelača stated that upon receiving the documents she introduced the case into procedure through the Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture, and not through the competent Sector for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and Digitization.
She explained that the case was assigned to her by a superior because, as she said, it concerned a procedure conducted under the Rules of Procedure of the Government, claiming that no one pointed out to her that the acts were unlawful. In her defense, Jelača stated that she acted exclusively formally, without delving into the content and legality of the initiatives which, after processing, were forwarded to ministries and the Government.
She also stated that the minister told her to initiate the procedure before the Government, and that her task was to turn the initiatives into proposals for decisions of the Ministry of Culture to remove protection from the General Staff and forward them to the Government of Serbia.
As a reminder, the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime filed an indictment proposal, not an indictment, against Selaković, Jelača, Ivanović, and Vasić, which should lead to a swift and efficient conclusion of the court proceedings.
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Source: Nova, Foto: Ata images