Da: ICDSM Italia <icdsm-italia @...>
Data: Gio 24 Feb 2005 12:42:09 Europe/Rome
A: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Shutting Down the Milosevic Defense in The Hague
[ T. Dickson, giurista canadese, consulente legale dell'ICDSM, rivela
gli ultimi abusi compiuti dalla "corte" dell'Aia e li paragona alle
modalità con cui agiva la "Star Chamber", famigerato tribunale politico
del XVII e XVIII secolo... ]
www.globalresearch.ca
Centre for Research on Globalisation
Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation
Beyond the Star Chamber:
Shutting Down the Milosevic Defense in The Hague
by Tiphaine Dickson
www.globalresearch.ca 20 February 2005
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DIC502A.html
------------------
Editor's Note
We bring to the attention of our readers this important analysis by
Tiphaine Dickson on the Milosevic trial, which points to the blatant
criminalization of international law in support of the US-NATO led
military invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia.
What we are dealing with in the case of the Hague Tribunal is the
criminalization, at the institutional level, of a UN sponsored body.
The ICTY has not only been involved in the cover-up of US-NATO war
crimes and atrocities, but in the indictment through Star Chamber
procedures, of the former head of state for the crimes committed by the
invading NATO forces, not to mention the atrocities carried out by
their proxy terrorist organization, including the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA), which was granted in the wake of the 1999 invasion, despite
its links to Al Qaeda and organized crime, the status of a bona fide UN
body.
The "Criminalization of the State", is when war criminals
legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to decide
"who are the criminals", when in fact they are the criminals. This
criminalization of the State is not limited to the Bush administration,
it permeates the UN system, which supports US-NATO led military
interventions under the disguise of peacekeeping. These humanitarian
interventions led by the war criminals, are implemented under the
auspices of what is euphemistically called the international community.
Peacekeeping in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq is
tantamount to military occupation.
Needless to say, to reach their design, war criminals in high
office must also redefine the contours of international law,
establishing a system reminiscent of the Star Chamber procedures of the
17th Century.
And this is precisely the thrust of Tiphaine Dickson's
investigation, on the Milosevic trial.
------------------
On February 14th, The Trial Chamber of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) hearing the Milosevic case
resumed proceedings after having adjourned last week following a UN
physician’s opinion that Slobodan Milosevic would require some days to
recover after having been affected by influenza in early February.
Media coverage had again complained of "delays in the trial", and of
illness—generally described as "bouts of flu"-- as the cause of "lost
time". The Chamber faulted President Milosevic for "wasting time" in
his examination of the former Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia with
respect to the secession of the former republics and of foreign
involvement in the conflicts that ensued as a result. Mr. Milosevic was
told the questions—of evident relevance, and indeed of crucial
importance-- were "pointless". The Prosecutor has asked for the
proceedings to continue in absence of Mr. Milosevic. The situation is
ominous and there is evidence that the ICTY is poised to take radical
measures, including the interruption, and ultimately the premature
conclusion of Slobodan Milosevic's defense.
Indeed, the ICTY, a UN Security Council institution, has set the
stage to justify ending these proceedings, while holding President
Milosevic responsible for the result, in four rulings, two of which
were handed down in the last two weeks. First, counsel is imposed
against his will. Second, in absentia proceedings are approved. Third,
imposed counsels are not allowed to withdraw from the case for ethical
reasons. And finally, the duration of the Prosecution case is
artificially reduced, and the time afforded to Slobodan Milosevic
inflated by counting his cross-examinations of Prosecution witnesses as
time devoted to his defense, in an unusual order devoted to statistics.
Slobodan Milosevic is either directly or indirectly made responsible
for the unfortunate state of affairs in all four decisions. All is in
place to wrap it up.
In September, the Trial Chamber imposed counsel against the clear
wishes of the defendant, a practice described by the United States
Supreme Court as having been largely abandoned since the unlamented
late 16th and early 17th century Star Chamber, an executive entity
infamous for trying political cases. The Chamber’s decision to impose
counsel with broad powers to determine the strategy of the defense
created a crisis, as defense witnesses refused to cooperate with
imposed counsel Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins, previously
ICTY-appointed amici curiae (friends of the court), thrust upon
Slobodan Milosevic as defense advocates, oblivious to the fact that
they’d been parties in the proceedings for over two years, and that
this created-- at minimum-- an apparent conflict of interest. Mr. Kay
complained bitterly, and publicly, about the non-cooperation of the
defense witnesses (the Chamber had received Slobodan Milosevic’s list
of witnesses when they imposed counsel), and complained of Milosevic’s
lack of cooperation as well, as the proceedings came to a virtual
standstill with a mere trickle of witnesses making the trip to testify
in The Hague.
The imposition of counsel upon an unwilling accused-- in clear
violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
which provides for the minimum fundamental right to defend oneself in
person-- was approved, as a matter of law, by the Appeals Chamber (the
initial imposition was appealed against by Mr. Kay and Ms. Higgins)
last November. The ruling reduced this right-- which is guaranteed by
the ICTY’s own Statute as a minimum fundamental right-- to the rank of
a mere "presumption". In so doing, the ICTY’s President, American
Theodor Meron, stated that all the "minimum" fundamental rights
afforded to the accused by the ICTY’s Statute (which were imported,
almost verbatim, from the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, leaving out only—inexplicably-- the Covenant’s provision of the
right to be tried by an independent, impartial, and competent court)
were "at a par" with the right to represent oneself in person. In other
words, the right for a defendant to represent himself is just a
"presumption" as are all the other basic, fundamental, internationally
recognized, minimal trial rights provided by the ICTY’s Statute, such
as the right to know the nature of the charge, the right to remain
silent, the right to present evidence in the same conditions as the
Prosecutor, the right to an interpreter, and the right to be tried in
one’s own presence. In fact, they are all stripped of their essence as
rights. The ad hoc international legal order holds them to be mere
"presumptions" to be violated at the discretion of a trial chamber when
expedient, or "justified". And as they are no longer really rights, it
then follows that they cannot even really be violated. And if they
can’t be violated, there is not much incentive to respect them, much
less guarantee them, as "minimal rights", nor to sanction or remedy
their breach.
President Meron’s decision was almost universally understood as
having handed a victory to President Milosevic, as it overturned, not
the legality, nor even the propriety, of the imposition of counsel, but
rather the modalities set out by the Trial Chamber for such
"assignment"—that is the ICTY’s delicate formulation-- of counsel.
Hence, President Meron directed that Mr. Milosevic be allowed to
present his defense and question his own witnesses, with imposed
counsel on standby in case of illness. Elsewhere in the Appeals Chamber
ruling, however, President Meron made a startlingly ominous claim: the
right to be tried in one’s presence is not absolute (it, too, it seems,
is but a "presumption") and can be obviated by "substantial disruption"
of the proceedings. This disruption need not be deliberate or even
intended by the accused, and can be caused merely by illness. The
possibility of holding in absentia proceedings in the Milosevic case as
a result of illness (as had been forcefully advocated by the former US
Ambassador for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer, in the International
Herald Tribune last summer), had just been approved by the Appeals
Chamber.
In early February, President Meron denied a request by imposed
counsels to resign from the proceedings, citing ethical incapacity to
continue in absence of cooperation from the "client", and complaining
of his public criticism of their work. The British barristers directly
blamed President Milosevic —the very person whose rights are being
violated by this imposition-- for their ethical predicament: "[T]he
accused has made a relationship of ‘candid exchange and trust’
impossible ." President Meron accordingly took Kay and Higgins’ word
for it, and set the responsibility for their inability to act for an
unwilling accused squarely at the feet of the very victim of the
measure: "an accused does not have the right to unilaterally destroy
the trust between himself and his counsel." (Although, as President
Milosevic had pointed out at a previous hearing, it is impossible to
destroy, unilaterally or otherwise, something that has never existed in
the first place.) Thus, citing the Appeals Chambers’ previous ruling in
the equally astonishing (and dismal, from a legal and human rights
perspective) case of General Vidoje Blagojevic, President Meron
resolved any and all ethical issues-- including such questions of
interest to lawyers everywhere, such as: how do you represent a client
who refuses your services, who will not speak to you, whose witnesses
do not trust you, who will not communicate facts to you, (such as those
relevant to a defense, including alibi) and how does one act for an
unwilling accused when one has acted for another party in the very same
proceedings?—by insisting on counsel’s obligations towards the ICTY, an
institution not recognized as a legitimate legal body by Slobodan
Milosevic. President Meron held that: "In such circumstances, "where an
Appellant unjustifiably resists legal representation from assigned
Counsel, Counsel’s professional obligations to continue to represent
the accused remain."
It is unfortunate that President Meron’s decision does not reveal
whether the British Bar Council provided an opinion with respect to the
ethical issues raised or whether one was in fact sought by imposed
counsel. Whatever the position of the UK Bar, a venerable institution
whose opinion might well have been of assistance to this debate, as far
as the ICTY is concerned, Mr. Kay and Ms. Higgins must continue to act,
as President Meron held that President Milosevic cannot be allowed to
"manufacture" a reason for counsels’ withdrawal by refusing to
cooperate. To "permit" him to do so, wrote Theodor Meron, would be to
"render nugatory" the Appeals Chamber decision to approve imposition of
counsel! One can only admire the perfection of that argument’s
circularity.
As a final indication that these proceedings may well (soon) be
derailed, late last week, the Trial Chamber issued an odd calculation
of the time devoted by both parties, the Prosecutor and Mr. Milosevic,
to the presentation of their respective cases. The ruling goes so far
as to count the minutes the institution has apparently suffered through
in what was announced as the "Trial of Century". This bizarre
accounting of time, unheard of in normal trials, and glaringly at odds
with known practice in the adversarial system, is meant to suggest that
these proceedings have gone on tediously long, and that in "bending
over backwards" the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia now
risks violating the "integrity" of international justice if it
continues to afford such overwhelming fairness to the accused. Such a
suggestion stands in sharp contrast with the reality of a skewed
process which has, from the moment the defendant was indicted—that is
at the height of an illegal bombing campaign, in the course of a war of
aggression against the nation of which he was the legitimate President,
by a Prosecutor who diligently informed the media that his new status
would disqualify him from negotiating peace— has not been characterized
by fairness, but by the steady violation of President Milosevic’s
rights and of international law itself.
These proceedings have indeed, on occasion, been excruciatingly
slow, but the main victim has been President Milosevic, "transferred"
to The Hague -- that is snatched from a Belgrade facility without
recourse to common law courts and in violation of the Yugoslav
constitution, according to the (then) Yugoslav constitutional court--
and detained under UN authority since June 28th, 2001. It is
astonishing to note that international justice, or what attempts to
portray itself as such, would tolerate the four and a half year
detention of a man suffering from malignant hypertension, and worse
yet, employ his illness as a justification, only once his defense had
begun, to impose counsel, in a display of medical concern much less
apparent during Ms. Del Ponte’s inexplicably historical/political
marathon presentation of evidence, much of which was not immediately
relevant, putting it mildly, to the charges contained in the
indictments. That the ICTY would attempt to blame Slobodan Milosevic
for this interminable trial is absurd. Indeed, the Prosecution's case,
presented while investigations were ongoing was for many observers
unintelligible, and meandering.
His surprisingly underreported defense, however, threatens to shed
some light on what he (and increasingly, his witnesses) have described,
not as the “Balkan Wars”, but as a single war against Yugoslavia, a
state no longer in existence, whose last days were punctuated by aerial
bombings not seen in Belgrade since they were carried out by the Allies
at the end of WWII and Nazi Germany in 1941. That is the war President
Milosevic is beginning to investigate in his defense, and that may well
be the reason why suddenly "time is being wasted", the "trial has drawn
on long enough", and that the "integrity" of the proceedings are now at
stake. Indeed, this defense could well present the very "substantial
disturbance" required to shut it—and perhaps the whole institution--
down.
Global Research Contributing Editor Tiphaine Dickson is a criminal
defence lawyer specialized in international criminal law based in
Montréal. She was lead counsel for the defence in one of the first UN
trials prosecuting genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda.
----------
Related articles by Tiphaine Dickson
Iraqi Elections Under Military Occupation: Canada Complicit in a
Parody of Democracy
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/www.globalresearch.ca/articles/
DIC501A.html
The Hague ICTY Tribunal: Star Chamber it Is! by Tiphaine Dickson
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/www.globalresearch.ca/articles/
DIC409A.html
Presiding Judge in Milosevic Trial resigns Cathrin Schütz
interviews Canadian lawyer Tiphaine Dickson
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/www.globalresearch.ca/articles/
DIC402A.html
"That Is The Nature Of The Beast": Why The Hague ICTY Cannot Afford
Slobodan Milosevic’s Right to Self-Representation by Tiphaine Dickson
and Aleksandar Jokic
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DIC410A.html
-----------
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==========================
Data: Gio 24 Feb 2005 12:42:09 Europe/Rome
A: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Shutting Down the Milosevic Defense in The Hague
[ T. Dickson, giurista canadese, consulente legale dell'ICDSM, rivela
gli ultimi abusi compiuti dalla "corte" dell'Aia e li paragona alle
modalità con cui agiva la "Star Chamber", famigerato tribunale politico
del XVII e XVIII secolo... ]
www.globalresearch.ca
Centre for Research on Globalisation
Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation
Beyond the Star Chamber:
Shutting Down the Milosevic Defense in The Hague
by Tiphaine Dickson
www.globalresearch.ca 20 February 2005
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DIC502A.html
------------------
Editor's Note
We bring to the attention of our readers this important analysis by
Tiphaine Dickson on the Milosevic trial, which points to the blatant
criminalization of international law in support of the US-NATO led
military invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia.
What we are dealing with in the case of the Hague Tribunal is the
criminalization, at the institutional level, of a UN sponsored body.
The ICTY has not only been involved in the cover-up of US-NATO war
crimes and atrocities, but in the indictment through Star Chamber
procedures, of the former head of state for the crimes committed by the
invading NATO forces, not to mention the atrocities carried out by
their proxy terrorist organization, including the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA), which was granted in the wake of the 1999 invasion, despite
its links to Al Qaeda and organized crime, the status of a bona fide UN
body.
The "Criminalization of the State", is when war criminals
legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to decide
"who are the criminals", when in fact they are the criminals. This
criminalization of the State is not limited to the Bush administration,
it permeates the UN system, which supports US-NATO led military
interventions under the disguise of peacekeeping. These humanitarian
interventions led by the war criminals, are implemented under the
auspices of what is euphemistically called the international community.
Peacekeeping in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq is
tantamount to military occupation.
Needless to say, to reach their design, war criminals in high
office must also redefine the contours of international law,
establishing a system reminiscent of the Star Chamber procedures of the
17th Century.
And this is precisely the thrust of Tiphaine Dickson's
investigation, on the Milosevic trial.
------------------
On February 14th, The Trial Chamber of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) hearing the Milosevic case
resumed proceedings after having adjourned last week following a UN
physician’s opinion that Slobodan Milosevic would require some days to
recover after having been affected by influenza in early February.
Media coverage had again complained of "delays in the trial", and of
illness—generally described as "bouts of flu"-- as the cause of "lost
time". The Chamber faulted President Milosevic for "wasting time" in
his examination of the former Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia with
respect to the secession of the former republics and of foreign
involvement in the conflicts that ensued as a result. Mr. Milosevic was
told the questions—of evident relevance, and indeed of crucial
importance-- were "pointless". The Prosecutor has asked for the
proceedings to continue in absence of Mr. Milosevic. The situation is
ominous and there is evidence that the ICTY is poised to take radical
measures, including the interruption, and ultimately the premature
conclusion of Slobodan Milosevic's defense.
Indeed, the ICTY, a UN Security Council institution, has set the
stage to justify ending these proceedings, while holding President
Milosevic responsible for the result, in four rulings, two of which
were handed down in the last two weeks. First, counsel is imposed
against his will. Second, in absentia proceedings are approved. Third,
imposed counsels are not allowed to withdraw from the case for ethical
reasons. And finally, the duration of the Prosecution case is
artificially reduced, and the time afforded to Slobodan Milosevic
inflated by counting his cross-examinations of Prosecution witnesses as
time devoted to his defense, in an unusual order devoted to statistics.
Slobodan Milosevic is either directly or indirectly made responsible
for the unfortunate state of affairs in all four decisions. All is in
place to wrap it up.
In September, the Trial Chamber imposed counsel against the clear
wishes of the defendant, a practice described by the United States
Supreme Court as having been largely abandoned since the unlamented
late 16th and early 17th century Star Chamber, an executive entity
infamous for trying political cases. The Chamber’s decision to impose
counsel with broad powers to determine the strategy of the defense
created a crisis, as defense witnesses refused to cooperate with
imposed counsel Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins, previously
ICTY-appointed amici curiae (friends of the court), thrust upon
Slobodan Milosevic as defense advocates, oblivious to the fact that
they’d been parties in the proceedings for over two years, and that
this created-- at minimum-- an apparent conflict of interest. Mr. Kay
complained bitterly, and publicly, about the non-cooperation of the
defense witnesses (the Chamber had received Slobodan Milosevic’s list
of witnesses when they imposed counsel), and complained of Milosevic’s
lack of cooperation as well, as the proceedings came to a virtual
standstill with a mere trickle of witnesses making the trip to testify
in The Hague.
The imposition of counsel upon an unwilling accused-- in clear
violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
which provides for the minimum fundamental right to defend oneself in
person-- was approved, as a matter of law, by the Appeals Chamber (the
initial imposition was appealed against by Mr. Kay and Ms. Higgins)
last November. The ruling reduced this right-- which is guaranteed by
the ICTY’s own Statute as a minimum fundamental right-- to the rank of
a mere "presumption". In so doing, the ICTY’s President, American
Theodor Meron, stated that all the "minimum" fundamental rights
afforded to the accused by the ICTY’s Statute (which were imported,
almost verbatim, from the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, leaving out only—inexplicably-- the Covenant’s provision of the
right to be tried by an independent, impartial, and competent court)
were "at a par" with the right to represent oneself in person. In other
words, the right for a defendant to represent himself is just a
"presumption" as are all the other basic, fundamental, internationally
recognized, minimal trial rights provided by the ICTY’s Statute, such
as the right to know the nature of the charge, the right to remain
silent, the right to present evidence in the same conditions as the
Prosecutor, the right to an interpreter, and the right to be tried in
one’s own presence. In fact, they are all stripped of their essence as
rights. The ad hoc international legal order holds them to be mere
"presumptions" to be violated at the discretion of a trial chamber when
expedient, or "justified". And as they are no longer really rights, it
then follows that they cannot even really be violated. And if they
can’t be violated, there is not much incentive to respect them, much
less guarantee them, as "minimal rights", nor to sanction or remedy
their breach.
President Meron’s decision was almost universally understood as
having handed a victory to President Milosevic, as it overturned, not
the legality, nor even the propriety, of the imposition of counsel, but
rather the modalities set out by the Trial Chamber for such
"assignment"—that is the ICTY’s delicate formulation-- of counsel.
Hence, President Meron directed that Mr. Milosevic be allowed to
present his defense and question his own witnesses, with imposed
counsel on standby in case of illness. Elsewhere in the Appeals Chamber
ruling, however, President Meron made a startlingly ominous claim: the
right to be tried in one’s presence is not absolute (it, too, it seems,
is but a "presumption") and can be obviated by "substantial disruption"
of the proceedings. This disruption need not be deliberate or even
intended by the accused, and can be caused merely by illness. The
possibility of holding in absentia proceedings in the Milosevic case as
a result of illness (as had been forcefully advocated by the former US
Ambassador for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer, in the International
Herald Tribune last summer), had just been approved by the Appeals
Chamber.
In early February, President Meron denied a request by imposed
counsels to resign from the proceedings, citing ethical incapacity to
continue in absence of cooperation from the "client", and complaining
of his public criticism of their work. The British barristers directly
blamed President Milosevic —the very person whose rights are being
violated by this imposition-- for their ethical predicament: "[T]he
accused has made a relationship of ‘candid exchange and trust’
impossible ." President Meron accordingly took Kay and Higgins’ word
for it, and set the responsibility for their inability to act for an
unwilling accused squarely at the feet of the very victim of the
measure: "an accused does not have the right to unilaterally destroy
the trust between himself and his counsel." (Although, as President
Milosevic had pointed out at a previous hearing, it is impossible to
destroy, unilaterally or otherwise, something that has never existed in
the first place.) Thus, citing the Appeals Chambers’ previous ruling in
the equally astonishing (and dismal, from a legal and human rights
perspective) case of General Vidoje Blagojevic, President Meron
resolved any and all ethical issues-- including such questions of
interest to lawyers everywhere, such as: how do you represent a client
who refuses your services, who will not speak to you, whose witnesses
do not trust you, who will not communicate facts to you, (such as those
relevant to a defense, including alibi) and how does one act for an
unwilling accused when one has acted for another party in the very same
proceedings?—by insisting on counsel’s obligations towards the ICTY, an
institution not recognized as a legitimate legal body by Slobodan
Milosevic. President Meron held that: "In such circumstances, "where an
Appellant unjustifiably resists legal representation from assigned
Counsel, Counsel’s professional obligations to continue to represent
the accused remain."
It is unfortunate that President Meron’s decision does not reveal
whether the British Bar Council provided an opinion with respect to the
ethical issues raised or whether one was in fact sought by imposed
counsel. Whatever the position of the UK Bar, a venerable institution
whose opinion might well have been of assistance to this debate, as far
as the ICTY is concerned, Mr. Kay and Ms. Higgins must continue to act,
as President Meron held that President Milosevic cannot be allowed to
"manufacture" a reason for counsels’ withdrawal by refusing to
cooperate. To "permit" him to do so, wrote Theodor Meron, would be to
"render nugatory" the Appeals Chamber decision to approve imposition of
counsel! One can only admire the perfection of that argument’s
circularity.
As a final indication that these proceedings may well (soon) be
derailed, late last week, the Trial Chamber issued an odd calculation
of the time devoted by both parties, the Prosecutor and Mr. Milosevic,
to the presentation of their respective cases. The ruling goes so far
as to count the minutes the institution has apparently suffered through
in what was announced as the "Trial of Century". This bizarre
accounting of time, unheard of in normal trials, and glaringly at odds
with known practice in the adversarial system, is meant to suggest that
these proceedings have gone on tediously long, and that in "bending
over backwards" the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia now
risks violating the "integrity" of international justice if it
continues to afford such overwhelming fairness to the accused. Such a
suggestion stands in sharp contrast with the reality of a skewed
process which has, from the moment the defendant was indicted—that is
at the height of an illegal bombing campaign, in the course of a war of
aggression against the nation of which he was the legitimate President,
by a Prosecutor who diligently informed the media that his new status
would disqualify him from negotiating peace— has not been characterized
by fairness, but by the steady violation of President Milosevic’s
rights and of international law itself.
These proceedings have indeed, on occasion, been excruciatingly
slow, but the main victim has been President Milosevic, "transferred"
to The Hague -- that is snatched from a Belgrade facility without
recourse to common law courts and in violation of the Yugoslav
constitution, according to the (then) Yugoslav constitutional court--
and detained under UN authority since June 28th, 2001. It is
astonishing to note that international justice, or what attempts to
portray itself as such, would tolerate the four and a half year
detention of a man suffering from malignant hypertension, and worse
yet, employ his illness as a justification, only once his defense had
begun, to impose counsel, in a display of medical concern much less
apparent during Ms. Del Ponte’s inexplicably historical/political
marathon presentation of evidence, much of which was not immediately
relevant, putting it mildly, to the charges contained in the
indictments. That the ICTY would attempt to blame Slobodan Milosevic
for this interminable trial is absurd. Indeed, the Prosecution's case,
presented while investigations were ongoing was for many observers
unintelligible, and meandering.
His surprisingly underreported defense, however, threatens to shed
some light on what he (and increasingly, his witnesses) have described,
not as the “Balkan Wars”, but as a single war against Yugoslavia, a
state no longer in existence, whose last days were punctuated by aerial
bombings not seen in Belgrade since they were carried out by the Allies
at the end of WWII and Nazi Germany in 1941. That is the war President
Milosevic is beginning to investigate in his defense, and that may well
be the reason why suddenly "time is being wasted", the "trial has drawn
on long enough", and that the "integrity" of the proceedings are now at
stake. Indeed, this defense could well present the very "substantial
disturbance" required to shut it—and perhaps the whole institution--
down.
Global Research Contributing Editor Tiphaine Dickson is a criminal
defence lawyer specialized in international criminal law based in
Montréal. She was lead counsel for the defence in one of the first UN
trials prosecuting genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda.
----------
Related articles by Tiphaine Dickson
Iraqi Elections Under Military Occupation: Canada Complicit in a
Parody of Democracy
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/www.globalresearch.ca/articles/
DIC501A.html
The Hague ICTY Tribunal: Star Chamber it Is! by Tiphaine Dickson
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/www.globalresearch.ca/articles/
DIC409A.html
Presiding Judge in Milosevic Trial resigns Cathrin Schütz
interviews Canadian lawyer Tiphaine Dickson
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/www.globalresearch.ca/articles/
DIC402A.html
"That Is The Nature Of The Beast": Why The Hague ICTY Cannot Afford
Slobodan Milosevic’s Right to Self-Representation by Tiphaine Dickson
and Aleksandar Jokic
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DIC410A.html
-----------
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