Letter from Sarajevo

Criminal law professor and human rights advocate Sadmir Karović has been a generous reader of, and contributor to, Drunk & Disorderly, almost from its beginning.

He’s been a good friend, too. He almost always sends me a note thanking me for that month’s edition of the newsletter; he is always kind. Sometimes he apologizes for his English — his first language is Bosnian, and he owes no apology to someone whose only language is an accident of birth. He doesn’t know that I would be just as happy to publish in whatever language he cares to write.

He’s unfailingly cheery, always hoping for the best. The best for me, the best for my family, the best for my country. He believes our democracy will defeat the enemies who lately have arisen from within. I think he has more faith in us than I do. His favorite season seems to be the spring; new life, new possibility.

I’m a worrier, so when he sent me a new article this spring, and I wrote to ask if he intended it for the newsletter, and he didn’t write back, I … worried. In December he told me he had Covid-19, and had recovered.

I’m going to adopt his sunny optimism, at least this one time, and link to his article anyway. He wrote it with another law professor, Marina Simović. It is an analysis of the state of criminal procedure in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which the English newspaper The Guardian declared has “most probably the world’s most complicated system of government.”

It was first published in the Journal of Criminology and Criminal Law, here.

Sadmir, as you say so often to me, “I hope you are good.”