It was a dramatic image: Montenegro’s former education minister, Vesna Bratic, handcuffed and nervously clutching her bag as she was escorted away last month by balaclava-clad officers for questioning and placed in pre-trial detention for 30 days.
The arrest of former ministers in Montenegro is no longer headline news. But the case against Bratic has reignited debate over political accountability, selective justice and who, ultimately, pays for unlawful decisions, as the country seeks to close key European Union chapters on the rule of law.
Bratic, who led the unified Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports after the 2020 change of government, became one of the most polarising officials of the new administration that came to power when the decades-long rule of Milo Djukanovic’s Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, ended. She is a member of the pro-Serbian, socially conservative United Montenegro party.