Last Wednesday, retired former heads of Maribor prosecutors Elizabeta Györkös and former Maribor prosecutor Boris Marčič, were invited, as witnesses to a session of the parliamentary commission, of inquiry into possible abuses in the prosecution of Franc Kangler. After the Constitutional Court suspended the implementation of the law and the rules of procedure on parliamentary investigation, until the final decision last year, the hearings of prosecutors, including Györkös and Marčič, were postponed in November last year. The then chairman of the commission, Žan Mahnič, announced, that they would wait with hearings until the final decision of the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court has not yet made a final decision and the commission has meanwhile summoned the aforementioned former prosecutors as a witness.
This decision of the Constitutional Court is also the reason, given by Marčič, for not attending the said hearing. He had informed the commission a week earlier that he would not be present. Former prosecutor Györkös apologized last Tuesday because of health reasons. “I find that only witness Elizabeta Györkös is absent for an excusable reason, while witness Boris Marčič does not have such a reason”, said the current chairman of the commission, Dejan Kaloh. He said that the invited former prosecutors, who were summoned as witnesses and not as defendants, would not be held accountable for their political responsibility, but the political responsibility of other public officials could be established, if they unlawfully interfered with their activities and activities of prosecutors and judges in individual cases. As Kaloh pointed out, such a position was also taken by constitutional judges Klemen Jaklič and Marko Šorli, in their separate dissenting opinions.
Among other things, Kaloh also presented these separate opinions. Thus, in connection with the interrogation of Marčič, Kaloh said, that, on the basis of a provisional decision of the Constitutional Court, he could always refuse to answer a possible question, relating to the exercise of his prosecutorial function. “It is by no means his responsibility to decide arbitrarily and without a legal basis, not to attend the hearing in front of the commission of inquiry, to which he was summoned as a witness”, Kaloh said, announcing that the two former prosecutors would be invited again to attend the hearing.
