From: icdsm-italia @...
Subject: [icdsm-italia] After Milosevic's defamation and murder
Date: May 23, 2006 11:21:32 AM GMT+02:00
To: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com


After Milosevic's defamation and murder

(I dubbi sulla dinamica dell'assassinio di Milosevic persistono,
visto anche il rifiuto da parte del "Tribunale ad hoc" di desecretare
i referti delle analisi e visite mediche effettuate durante la
detenzione / Vari relatori intervenuti nel corso di una conferenza
recentemente svoltasi in Irlanda hanno posto il problema del
carattere fazioso ed illegale del "Tribunale" / Dopo il misterioso
licenziamento del braccio destro della Del Ponte, Florence Hartmann,
circolano adesso voci riguardo ad una inchiesta aperta per "molestie
sessuali" nei confronti dell'altro collaboratore della "pubblica
accusa", Geoffrey Nice, il quale pure non lavora più per questa
istituzione para-legale...)

---

IWPR’S TRIBUNAL UPDATE No. 451, May 5, 2006 -- www.iwpr.net

<< ... Tribunal Update is supported by the European Commission, the
Dutch Ministry for Development and Cooperation, the Swedish
International Development and Cooperation Agency, the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, and other funders. IWPR also acknowledges
general support from the Ford Foundation... >>

MILOSEVIC TRIAL: FAIR, FAKED OR FANTASY?

Conference delegates debate Hague tribunal’s performance and ask
whether the former Serb leader got a fair hearing.

By Helen Warrell in Galway

More than a month after former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic
was buried with all the pomp and splendour of a lavish Belgrade
ceremony, there is no danger of the subject of his trial being laid
to rest.

This week, tribunal employees, Balkans experts, academics, diplomats
and legal commentators gathered at the Irish Centre for Human Rights
in Galway to attend a conference ambitiously titled “The Slobodan
Milosevic Trial: The Verdict”.

William Schabas, a genocide expert and the centre’s director,
acknowledged the unusual nature of the meeting as he opened the
debate. “I cannot think of a precedent for this happening in
international law,” he said. “We could certainly never do this in
national law.”

The conference was born out of a feeling that the unexpected death of
Milosevic just as the four year case against him was ending called
for some sort of closure, which tribunal judges would no longer be
able to provide.

However, the discussions concentrated not on the guilt or innocence
of Milosevic, but on passing verdict on the tribunal itself. Rather
than being a debate about the strength of the evidence brought
against the ex-president, the focus was on how it had been presented.

Participants looked at whether the trial had been fair, and whether
enough had been done to protect the rights of the former president as
he defended himself.

The overall tone of the conference was critical, and this mood
extended from procedural aspects of the Milosevic trial all the way
to back to first principles, with some participants suggesting the
tribunal was politicised from the start and thus had little hope of
being fair.

The opposing view was not heard so strongly in Galway - that the
undoubted problems the Hague court has encountered along the way
should not obscure the bigger picture. Supporters of the Hague
process have argued strongly elsewhere that war criminals must be
brought to account and some kind of closure sought among the
communities involved in a conflict – and that participants on all
sides should be subject to investigation.

One speaker who did make this point was Michael Scharf, director of
the Frederick K Cox International Law Centre at Case Western Reserve
University, who said that with the advent of the Hague court, "the
era of impunity has been replaced by an era of accountability".

Stephen Kay, Milosevic’s court-assigned counsel, was among those who
expressed concern that the political history behind the tribunal may
have compromised its ability to dispense justice in a fair and
coherent manner.

He insisted that ad hoc tribunals such as the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia host “political trials” which end
up being “weighed down by the dead hand of the international
community from which they are born”.

Kay and co-counsel Gillian Higgins were present on each day of the
trial, and were responsible for writing Milosevic’s legal submissions
to the court. From the unique vantage point of someone who had close
contact with Milosevic, Kay is adamant that the action brought
against his client was an example of “selective justice”.

“[The Hague cases] are put forward as trials for the benefit of the
community out of which the conflict is arising. But we all know that
states and nations get away [with illegal actions] if they are on the
right side of the United Nations Security Council,” he said.

Fairness depends partially on all parties being subject to the same
rules and conditions, and Kay and others at the Galway conference
suggested this was not the case in the Milosevic trial.

John Laughland, a British journalist who is currently writing a book
that argues that the trial was a “corruption of international
justice”, asked why the Yugoslav tribunal had failed to indict NATO
for war crimes following its controversial air strikes on Kosovo
between March and June 1999.

David Scheffer, former ambassador-at-large for war crimes in the US
State Department, replied that his government had been “very engaged”
with the tribunal prosecution on this issue and had felt “very
strongly” that there was no need for an investigation.

Scheffer also firmly denied that the American government had lobbied
the prosecutor to indict Milosevic in 1999. “[The Hague tribunal] is
an independent court,” he said.

Despite such assurances, there have been frequent criticisms that the
Milosevic indictment –166 pages of allegations concerning crimes in
Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo – was not the work of an independent body.

The Bosnia indictment, which accuses Milosevic of genocide and
complicity in genocide against Bosnian Muslims, came under particular
criticism from Schabas, who said that “sticking on a genocide count”
in order to “keep a third of Yugoslavia happy” was no way to run a
trial.

He argued that even the most famous instance of genocide in the wars
in the former Yugoslavia, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which some
8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by advancing Bosnian
Serb troops, was not ordered by Milosevic or any of the Serb
leadership in Belgrade.

Kay went further to suggest that the infamous Scorpions video, which
appears to show Bosnian Serb paramilitaries carrying out executions
at Srebrenica, was “not part of the evidence against Milosevic”,
and “was just shown [during the trial] so that the world media would
report it”.

This was not the only criticism that Milosevic’s counsel levelled at
the fairness of the trial.

Gillian Higgins suggested that the length and breadth of the
indictment had taken an “inordinately excessive” toll on all the
parties involved. She cited the fact that in the Milosevic
indictment, deportation alone was listed as eight different forms of
criminal conduct in 64 locations spanning 13 municipalities. The
prosecution’s exhibits amounted to 85,526 pages of printed material
and 117 videos.

“Was the scope of the trial too broad and far-reaching to be fair?”
she asked.

Higgins’s conclusion was that although international trials are not
inherently unfair, “the larger the battlefield and the longer the
war, the harder it is to protect the rights of the accused”.

Throughout the trial, many observers suggested that the conflict
within the courtroom was aggravated by Milosevic himself. However,
when Scharf said that Milosevic had obstructed the trial, he met with
a storm of criticism.

Higgins objected strongly to the characterisation of Milosevic as
disruptive and said the judges had never referred to him in this way.

Defending the former president’s often antagonistic stance, Higgins
said, “The courtroom is a place of battle, and that is what Milosevic
was prepared for.”

Schabas agreed that Milosevic “was not obnoxious and difficult in the
courtroom”, while Kay said that it had been “pure political
expediency” and not obstructiveness on Milosevic’s part that had
caused people to object to him representing himself.

Kay feels strongly that the question of Milosevic’s right to defend
himself is key to the successful working of the whole trial. “You
have to structure the trial so that the man who knows the case best
can argue that case,” he said. “No lawyer in the world knew that case
better than Milosevic.”

But in all their criticisms, Milosevic’s lawyers were careful not to
lay blame on individuals within the tribunal. Rounding off her
evaluation of the trial, Higgins was surprisingly conciliatory.

“Looking back at the courtroom and the players that toiled day in,
year out, every person in the courtroom worked endlessly to ensure
that the accused’s rights were protected, however differently these
rights were perceived by the parties,” she said.

Another problem highlighted at the conference was the differences of
approach taken by participants in the Hague process.

Michael Johnson, the former chief of prosecutions at the Hague
tribunal, implied that prosecutors had not always agreed on the right
course of action.

“The prosecution is a large institution which doesn’t always speak
with one voice,” he said, adding that differences in culture and
national procedures had led to a diversity of attitudes among
prosecutors, even on such fundamental issues such as the objective of
holding a trial.

“[Within the prosecution] there are those who believe that their
purpose was to prove the history of the conflict. There are [also]
those who strongly believe that the job of the prosecution was to
prove the guilt or innocence of the accused,” said Johnson.

According to Kay, this difference is vital. If the tribunal tries to
create a historical record, it will only distract from the details of
the crimes as they occurred.

“You lose sight of the bodies in the sandpit, the empty villages, the
shelling in the cities,” he said. “This is the material stuff of the
trial.”

But if many at the Galway conference criticised the conduct of the
trial and some of the underlying principles, a few such as Mark
Vlasic, who worked on the Milosevic prosecution case, reminded
everyone that the trial had been prompted by very real acts of violence.

"Witnesses came [to the tribunal] from all over the world. For them,
it was a positive experience: they went back to their cities, towns,
hamlets, villages and told about how they had testified against one
who had caused so much trouble in their countries," said Vlasic.

"It is easy to step back and discuss these trials in an abstract way
but mass graves litter the Balkans. The ICTY [former Yugoslav
tribunal] serves as a forum for these lost souls."

Helen Warrell is an IWPR contributor.

---

IWPR’S TRIBUNAL UPDATE No. 453, May 22, 2006 -- www.iwpr.net

<< ... Tribunal Update is supported by the European Commission, the
Dutch Ministry for Development and Cooperation, the Swedish
International Development and Cooperation Agency, the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, and other funders. IWPR also acknowledges
general support from the Ford Foundation... >>

JUDGES TO DECIDE ON MILOSEVIC DOCUMENTS

Tribunal President Judge Fausto Pocar has asked the same set of
judges who oversaw Slobodan Milosevic’s trial to decide whether
confidentiality measures should be lifted from documents relating to
his medical treatment in The Hague and his efforts to receive care in
Moscow.

The lawyers formerly assigned to the former Yugoslav president’s
defence case, Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins, say Milosevic wanted
the material made public.

They previously considered asking the chamber which handled
Milosevic’s trial – made up of Judge Patrick Robinson, Judge Iain
Bonomy and Judge O-gon Kwon – to address the issue. But they were
informed by the registry that since the case was closed, these judges
were no longer in a position to deal with the issue.

Kay and Higgins’s next move was to approach a chamber tasked with
deciding whether confidential records from the Milosevic trial could
be made available for an inquest and an inquiry. Again, they were
told that they were speaking to the wrong people.

The lawyers subsequently turned to the appeals chamber in an effort
to overturn the latter decision. But that bid was thrown out earlier
this week, with the appeals judges arguing that Kay and Higgins were
no longer formally involved in any case at the tribunal and were
therefore not in a position to petition its judges.

The lawyers had insisted that this fact should be overlooked. The
court had a responsibility to resolve outstanding issues which would
otherwise “perplex” Milosevic’s family and risk damaging the
tribunal’s reputation, they said, especially given the historical
significance of his trial.

The appeals judges insisted that a Dutch inquest and an internal
inquiry into Milosevic’s death, and an audit of the tribunal’s
detention facilities, would provide “ample information” to
Milosevic’s relatives and satisfy public interest in the issue.

In his latest order, published on May 18, Judge Pocar requested
Judges Robinson, Bonomy and Kwon to decide whether “there is any
reason in the interests of justice” for unveiling the documents.

He noted that the choice of chamber took into account the court’s
“trial management and case distribution needs”.

---

www.b92.net
B92, Belgrade - April 27, 2006

Nice under investigation? | 09:44 April 27 | B92

THE HAGUE -- Rumours are circulating that Hague Prosecutor Jeffrey
Nice is under sexual harassment investigations.

The Hague did not want to comment on the issue. Hague spokesperson
Anton Nikiforov told reporters that Nice no longer works for the
Tribunal and that he was let go after the death of Slobodan Milosevic.

He also said that the questions posed by the reporters are of a
private and personal nature and do not concern the Tribunal.

"If anything does exist, that is a question that will be handled by
the Sector for Personal Questions in (the UN's headquarters) New
York." Nikiforov said.


==========================

IN DIFESA DELLA JUGOSLAVIA
Il j'accuse di Slobodan Milosevic
di fronte al "Tribunale ad hoc" dell'Aia"
(Ed. Zambon 2005, 10 euro)

Tutte le informazioni sul libro, appena uscito, alle pagine:
http://www.pasti.org/autodif.html
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/icdsm-italia/message/204

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