Delić’s lawyer pushes back at the Ministry: Mojkovac mayor’s mandate has not ended

The saga of the mandate of Mojkovac Municipality mayor Vesko Delić continues. Delić was sentenced to six months of suspended imprisonment for abuse of official duty, after in 2022 he appointed without competition the heads of the Municipal Police and the Protection Service in Mojkovac. The suspended sentence is not executed as long as it is not revoked.

The Ministry of Public Administration, headed by Minister Maraš Dukaj, maintains that Delić’s mandate has ended by force of law, under the Law on Local Self-Government, and has asked the Mojkovac Municipal Assembly to formally confirm this. However, the session scheduled for September 14 failed for lack of quorum, as the majority boycotted it.

Delić’s lawyer, Artan Kurti, responded to the Ministry with a letter dated September 16, accessed by the newspaper “Vijesti.” According to Kurti, the Ministry’s position is unfounded: the fact that the Law on Local Self-Government (Article 65, paragraph 1, point 4) regulates the end of a municipality mayor’s mandate does not exclude the application of the Criminal Code provisions on the legal consequences of a sentence.

Kurti refers to Article 115, paragraph 2, of the Criminal Code, under which the legal consequences of a sentence cannot occur when an unrevoked suspended sentence has been imposed. According to the lawyer, Article 65 of the Law on Local Self-Government must be harmonized with this provision and cannot be applied mechanically, without regard to the Criminal Code rules on the consequences of a suspended sentence.

Minister Dukaj has also relied on a 2013 Supreme Court position on the “lex specialis” principle, under which the special law takes precedence over the general one. Lawyer Kurti considers such a declarative reference insufficient: according to him, the Ministry must specifically justify why the Criminal Code provisions on the legal consequences of a sentence would not apply in Delić’s concrete case.

Source: Vijesti