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International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)[a] was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.

International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia

25 May 1993

31 December 2017

The Hague, Netherlands

52°05′40″N 4°17′03″E / 52.0944°N 4.2843°E / 52.0944; 4.2843

United Nations Security Council Resolution 827

Four years

www.icty.org

It was established by Resolution 827 of the United Nations Security Council, which was passed on 25 May 1993. It had jurisdiction over four clusters of crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991: grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The maximum sentence that it could impose was life imprisonment. Various countries signed agreements with the United Nations to carry out custodial sentences.


A total of 161 persons were indicted; the final indictments were issued in December 2004, the last of which were confirmed and unsealed in the spring of 2005.[1] The final fugitive, Goran Hadžić, was arrested on 20 July 2011.[2] The final judgment was issued on 29 November 2017[3] and the institution formally ceased to exist on 31 December 2017.[4]


Residual functions of the ICTY, including the oversight of sentences and consideration of any appeal proceedings initiated since 1 July 2013, are under the jurisdiction of a successor body, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).[5]

the chief prosecutor of the tribunal, said in 2021 that the US did not want the ICTY to scrutinise war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army. According to her, Madeleine Albright, the United States secretary of state at the time, told her to slow down the investigation of Ramush Haradinaj.[36]

Carla Del Ponte

William Blum and others accused the court of having a pro-NATO bias due to its refusal to prosecute NATO officials and politicians for war crimes.[37]

Michael Mandel

On 6 December 2006, the Tribunal at The Hague approved the use of 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".[38]

force-feeding

Reducing the indictment charges after the arrest of , Croatian officials publicly condemned chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz for his announcement that the former Bosnian Serb General would be tried solely for crimes allegedly committed in Bosnia, not in Croatia.[39][40]

Ratko Mladić

Critics have questioned whether the Tribunal exacerbates tensions rather than promotes reconciliation,[42][43] as is claimed by Tribunal supporters. Polls show a generally negative reaction to the Tribunal among both Serbs and Croats.[43] A majority of Serbs and Croats have expressed doubts regarding the ICTY's integrity and question the tenability of its legal procedures.[43]

[41]

68% of indictees have been (or Montenegrins),[43] 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,[44] 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 (Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army), who was acquitted, has been indicted from the Serbian military or political top when it comes to wars in Croatia and Bosnia.[43]

Serbs

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 , 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.[45]

Veljko Kadijević

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 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".[46] (France refused to extradite Hartmann to serve the prison sentence issued against her by the ICTY after she refused to pay the €7,000 fine.)

Florence Hartmann

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.[47]

Klaus-Peter Willsch

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 [Šljivančanin], had committed in Vukovar, notably at Ovčara, he should have been jailed for life. I'm outraged.... The Hague(-based) tribunal has showed again that it is not a just tribunal."[49] 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".[49] Pavle Strugar's 8-year sentence for shelling of Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, also caused outrage in Croatia.[50] Judge Kevin Parker (of Australia) was named in a Croatian journal (Nacional) as a main cause of the system's failure for having dismissed the testimonies of numerous witnesses.[50]

[48]

Some of the defendants, such as , 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".[51] The legal criticism has been succinctly stated in a memorandum 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.[52]

Slobodan Milošević

The interactive was convened on 10 April 2013 by the President of the General Assembly, Vuk Jeremić, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia during the resumed part of the GA's 67th Session.[53] 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.[54] 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.[55] The President of the General Assembly, Jeremić, described Meron's refusal to participate in this debate as scandalous.[56] He emphasized that he does not shy away from criticizing the ICTY, which has "convicted nobody for inciting crimes committed against Serbs in Croatia.".[57] Jeremić, who served as President of the General Assembly in his capacity as Serbian Foreign Minister, was effectively speaking on behalf of the Serbian government when making such statements and his views do not necessarily reflect those of the UN General Assembly. 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.[58] Vitaly Churkin, the ambassador of Russia to the UN, criticized the work of the ICTY, especially the overturned convictions of Gotovina and Ramush Haradinaj.[59]

thematic debate on the role of international criminal justice in reconciliation

Regarding the final case on 29 November 2017 proceeding encompassing six Bosnian-Croat individuals, one of whom, , in protest in court drank poison and subsequently died,[60][61] 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 the collaboration of both armies at a time when the neighbouring 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.[62][63]

Slobodan Praljak

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.

Criticisms of the court include:

List of people indicted in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Command responsibility

International Criminal Court

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Trial of Gotovina et al

Edit this at Wikidata

Official website

International Center for Transitional Justice, Criminal Justice page

: Monitoring of the ICTY

International Progress Organization

Del Ponte, Carla (2003). , public lecture by Carla Del Ponte, Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, given at the London School of Economics, 20 October 2003.

The role of international criminal prosecutions in reconstructing divided communities

Topical digests of the case law of ICTR and ICTY, Human Rights Watch, 2004

: Academic gateway to The Hague organisations concerning international peace, justice and security.

Hague Justice Portal

: Hague Justice Portal

Calendar of court proceedings before the ICTY

Why Journalists Should be Worried by the Rwanda Tribunal Precedents (deals also with ICTY) by Thierry Cruvellier for Reporters Without Borders

a special project based in ICTY

SENSE News Agency

Complete web-based video archive of the Milosevic trial

by Vojin Dimitrijevic, Florence Hartmann, Dejan Jovic, Tija Memisevic, edited by Judy Batt, Jelena Obradović, Chaillot Paper No. 116, June 2009, European Union Institute for Security Studies

War Crimes, conditionality and EU integration in the Western Balkans

by Fausto Pocar on the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Historic Archives of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law

Introductory note

of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Historic Archives of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law

Procedural history

by Fausto Pocar entitled Completing the Mandate: The Legal Challenges Facing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Lecture Series of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law

Lecture

by Fausto Pocar entitled Contribution of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to the Development of International Humanitarian Law in the Lecture Series of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law

Lecture

by Patrick Lipton Robinson, Fairness and Efficiency in the Proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Lecture Series of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law

Lecture