International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

History

Creation

Implementation

Operation

Accomplishments

1. "Spearheading the shift from impunity to accountability", pointing out that, until very recently, it was the only court judging crimes committed as part of the Yugoslav conflict, since prosecutors in the former Yugoslavia were, as a rule, reluctant to prosecute such crimes;
2. "Establishing the facts", highlighting the extensive evidence-gathering and lengthy findings of fact that Tribunal judgments produced;
3. "Bringing justice to thousands of victims and giving them a voice", pointing out the large number of witnesses that had been brought before the Tribunal;
4. "The accomplishments in international law", describing the fleshing out of several international criminal law concepts which had not been ruled on since the Nuremberg Trials;
5. "Strengthening the Rule of Law", referring to the Tribunal's role in promoting the use of international standards in war crimes prosecutions by former Yugoslav republics.

   Closure

Organization

Prosecutors

Chambers

Judges

Registry

Detention facilities

Indictees

• 111 had trials completed by the ICTY:
• * 21 were acquitted by the ICTY:
• ** 18 acquittals have stood;
• ** 1 was originally acquitted by the ICTY, but convicted on appeal by the IRMCT of one count
• ** 2 were originally acquitted by the ICTY, but following successful appeal by the prosecution the acquittals were overturned and a retrial is being conducted by the IRMCT; and
• * 90 were convicted and sentenced by the ICTY:
• ** 87 were transferred to 14 different states where they served their prison sentences, had sentences that amounted to time spent in detention during trial, or died after conviction:
• *** 20 remain imprisoned;
• *** 58 completed their sentences;
• *** 9 died while completing their sentences or after conviction awaiting transfer
• ** 2 were convicted and sentenced, and remain in IRMCT detention awaiting transfer; and
• ** 1 was convicted and sentenced, but has filed an appeal to the IRMCT that is being considered
• 13 had their cases transferred to courts in:
• * Bosnia and Herzegovina ;
• * Croatia ; and
• * Serbia
• 37 had their cases terminated prior to trial completion, because
• * the indictments were withdrawn ; or
• * the indictees died before or after transfer to the Tribunal.

Criticism

• On 6 December 2006, the Tribunal at The Hague approved the use of force-feeding of Serbian politician Vojislav Šešelj. They decided it was not "torture, inhuman or degrading treatment if there is a medical necessity to do so... and if the manner in which the detainee is force-fed is not inhuman or degrading".
• Reducing the indictment charges after the arrest of Ratko Mladić, Croatian officials publicly condemned chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz for his announcement that the former Bosnian Serb General, will be tried solely for crimes allegedly committed in Bosnia, not in Croatia.
• Critics have questioned whether the Tribunal exacerbates tensions rather than promotes reconciliation, as is claimed by Tribunal supporters. Polls show a generally negative reaction to the Tribunal among both Serbs and Croats. A majority of Serbs and Croats have expressed doubts regarding the ICTY's integrity and question the tenability of its legal procedures.
• 68% of indictees have been Serbs, to the extent that a sizeable portion of the Bosnian Serb and Croatian Serb political and military leaderships have been indicted. Many have seen this as reflecting bias, while the Tribunal's defenders have seen this as indicative of the actual proportion of crimes committed. However, Marko Hoare claimed that, aside from Milošević, only Momčilo Perišić, who was acquitted, has been indicted from the Serbian military or political top when it comes to wars in Croatia and Bosnia.
• According to Hoare, a former employee at the ICTY, an investigative team worked on indictments of senior members of the "joint criminal enterprise", including not only Milošević but also Veljko Kadijević, Blagoje Adžić, Borisav Jović, Branko Kostić, Momir Bulatović and others. However, Hoare claims that, due to Carla del Ponte's intervention, these drafts were rejected, and the indictment limited to Milošević alone.
• There have been allegations of censorship: in July 2011, the Appeals Chamber of ICTY confirmed the judgment of the Trial Chamber which found journalist and former Tribunal's OTP spokesperson Florence Hartmann guilty of contempt of court and fined her €7,000. She disclosed documents of FR Yugoslavia's Supreme Defense Council meetings and criticized the Tribunal for granting confidentiality of some information in them to protect Serbia's 'vital national interests' during Bosnia's lawsuit against the country for genocide in front of the International Court of Justice. Hartmann argued that Serbia was freed of the charge of genocide because ICTY redacted certain information in the Council meetings. Since these documents have in the meantime been made public by the ICTY itself, a group of organizations and individuals, who supported her, said that the Tribunal in this appellate proceedings "imposed a form of censorship aimed to protect the international judges from any form of criticism".
• Klaus-Peter Willsch compared the Ante Gotovina verdict, in which the late Croatian president Franjo Tuđman was posthumously found to have been participating in a Joint Criminal Enterprise, with the 897 Cadaver Synod trial in Rome, when Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of Pope Formosus exhumed, put on trial and posthumously convicted.
• Some sentences have been considered too mild, even within the Tribunal, complained at small sentences of convicted war criminals in comparison with their crimes. In 2010, Veselin Šljivančanin's sentence for his involvement in the Vukovar massacre was cut from 17 to 10 years, which caused outrage in Croatia. Upon hearing that news, Vesna Bosanac, who had been in charge of the Vukovar hospital during the fall of the city, said that the "ICTY is dead" for her: "For crimes that he , had committed in Vukovar, notably at Ovčara, he should have been jailed for life. I'm outraged.... The Hague tribunal has showed again that it is not a just tribunal." Danijel Rehak, the head of Croatian Association of Prisoners in Serbian Concentration Camps, said, "The shock of families whose beloved ones were killed at Ovčara is unimaginable. The court made a crucial mistake by accepting a statement of a JNA officer to whom Šljivančanin was a commander. I cannot understand that". Pavle Strugar's 8-year sentence for shelling of Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, also caused outrage in Croatia. Judge Kevin Parker was named in a Croatian journal as a main cause of the system's failure for having dismissed the testimonies of numerous witnesses.
• Some of the defendants, such as Slobodan Milošević, claimed that the Court has no legal authority because it was established by the UN Security Council instead of the UN General Assembly and so had not been created on a broad international basis. The Tribunal was established on the basis of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter; the relevant portion of which reads "the Security Council can take measures to maintain or restore international peace and security". The legal criticism has been succinctly stated in a issued by Austrian Professor Hans Köchler, which was submitted to the President of the Security Council in 1999. British Conservative Party MEP Daniel Hannan has called for the court to be abolished, claiming it is anti-democratic and a violation of national sovereignty.
• The interactive thematic debate on the role of international criminal justice in reconciliation was convened on 10 April 2013 by the President of the General Assembly during the resumed part of the GA's 67th Session. The debate was scheduled after the convictions of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač for inciting war crimes against Serbs in Croatia were overturned by an ICTY Appeals Panel in November 2012. The ICTY president Theodor Meron announced that all three Hague war-crimes courts turned down the invitation of UNGA president to participate in the debate about their work. The President of the General Assembly described Meron's refusal to participate in this debate as scandalous. He emphasized that he does not shy away from criticizing the ICTY, which has "convicted nobody for inciting crimes committed against Serbs in Croatia." Tomislav Nikolić, the president of Serbia criticized the ICTY, claiming it did not contribute but hindered reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia. He added that although there is no significant ethnic disproportion among the number of casualties in the Yugoslav wars, the ICTY sentenced Serbs and ethnic Serbs to a combined total of 1150 years in prison while claiming that members of other ethnic groups have been sentenced to a total of 55 years for crimes against Serbs. Vitaly Churkin, the ambassador of Russia to the UN, criticized the work of the ICTY, especially the overturned convictions of Gotovina and Ramush Haradinaj.
• Regarding the final case on November 29, 2017 proceeding encompassing six Bosnian-Croat individuals, one of whom Slobodan Praljak in protest in court drank a poison and subsequently died, the Prime Minister of Croatia Andrej Plenković claimed the verdict was "unjust" and Praljak's suicide "speaks of deep moral injustice to the six Croats, from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croat people". He criticized the verdict because it did not recognize the assistance and support provided by Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina and collaboration of both armies at a time when the neighboring state was faced with the "Greater-Serbian aggression" and when its territorial integrity was compromised, as well it alludes to the link between the then leadership of the Republic of Croatia, while in the previous verdict to Bosnian-Serb Ratko Mladić does not recognize the connection with Serbia's state officials at that time.
• Dutch filmmaker Jos de Putter made a trilogy, The Milosevic Case - Glosses at Trial, for Tegenlicht investigative slot at the VPRO. The main hypothesis of the film is that ICTY prosecution has been struggling and failing to prove any link between Milosevic and the media version of the truth of the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. The legitimacy of the prosecution methodology in securing the witness accounts and evidence, in general, has been examined by the filmmaker.

  Response to criticism

" which is not to deliver justice for past wrongs equally for 'all sides', fostering reconciliation, but to carefully measure each case on its own merits... We should judge the work of the tribunal by its legal expertise, not by the political outcomes we desire."

"This is, of course, the claim that hardline Serb nationalists and supporters of Slobodan Milosevic have been making for about the last two decades. Instead of carrying out any research into the actual record of the ICTY in order to support his thesis, Harland simply repeats a string of cliches of the kind that frequently appear in anti-Hague diatribes by Serb nationalists."