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BIRN Journalist Attends Hague Conference

08 March 2010  Dragana Erjavec, a journalist on BIRN Justice Report, has attended a conference on "Assessing the Legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia" organised at The Hague.

More than 400 participants at the two-day international conference held at the end of February discussed steps that have to be taken in order to ensure that the Hague Tribunal's work will have a lasting impact on the countries of the the Western Balkans.   

In addition to current and former judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, the conference was attended by court presidents and chief prosecutors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, justice ministers and representatives of victims' associations and non-governmental organizations from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region.

In his opening speech ICTY President Patrick Robinson said the former Yugoslav countries should continue the Tribunal's work and have full access to the Tribunal's public records and the option of using them in the future.

"The Tribunal has a fixed-term mandate. We will complete our work in 2013 or perhaps in February 2014. For this reason, we consider it is the right time to assess the capacity-building projects we initiated in the former Yugoslav countries," Robinson said.

Despite the fact that for a considerable period of time the ICTY has helped national judicial institutions by enabling them to access the records needed for processing war crimes in the region, there is still no common stand on what to do with the Tribunal's archives after its closure.

While representatives of judicial institutions and victims' associations from Bosnia and Herzegovina said in their public statements at the conference that the Tribunal's archives should be kept in their country, because most of the crimes were committed there, representatives from Serbia and Croatia said the ICTY archives should not be kept in any of the former Yugoslav countries.

After the conference ended, the ICTY announced that it will prepare a report on a comprehensive legacy strategy, and that it will continue talks on the ICTY archives with the countries of the Western Balkans.

The Conference on Assessing the Legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was co-organized by the Government of the Netherlands, the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project at the UCLA School of Law and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland and Finland.