ZAGREB, February 24, 2018 – The lessons drawn from the work of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) should be fair and efficient prosecution of perpetrators of serious crimes in armed conflicts and well as deterrence against possible war crimes, academician Davorin Rudolf said at a conference which the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) held in Zagreb on Friday.
Rudolf said that since the United Nations established that tribunal in The Hague, there have been many doubts. Some of the doubts are as to why the UN Security Council has not incorporated crime against peace in the tribunal’s statute and why the tribunal failed to issue indictments against war mongers, some of whom were members of the presidency of Yugoslavia and Serbian political leaders, Rudolf said.
Professor Davor Derenčinović from the Zagreb University law school said that, in the largest part of its work, the tribunal tackled matters pertaining to history rather than establishing criminal responsibility.
Courts are not the best places for defining history. The duty of the Hague tribunal was not to establish the truth, as its model of criminal proceedings was similar to the common law system, confronting the prosecution and the defence, in which the voice of victims cannot be heard loudly enough, Derenčinović said.
Lawyer Vesna Alaburić, who represented General Milivoj Petković, sentenced by the ICTY to 20 years for crimes against Bosniaks, said that the tribunals set up by the UN for the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda were a sort of experiment where, for the first time, all parties in the conflict were tried.
Being a defence lawyer for General Petković, I had to forget all I know about criminal law and be prepared for a completely different set of rules, Alaburić said, adding that there was no evidence that the political leaders of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina had planned to carry out crimes and attain any goal by criminal means.
