Mr. President,
Distinguished Members of the Security Council,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for the opportunity to address you on behalf of the Republic of Serbia today.
Mr. President,
A witness to the completion of the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (The Mechanism) in the foreseeable future, I take this opportunity to advise of some of the key moments in Serbia’s cooperation with this institution. I shall shed light on certain tendencies taking shape at this juncture of the work of the Mechanism that may foreshadow future developments.
The provision for the Mechanism to close its work in June 2020 is at odds with the assessments of the Mechanism’s officials that some cases will not be completed by the end of 2020.
This fact calls into question the possibility of the Mechanism to complete the remaining cases prior to the projected deadline of its closure and brings into focus the question of the institutional framework within which the issues to remain unresolved by that time will be considered.
In this context, however, certain assertions in the Progress Report of the Mechanism Prosecutor to the Security Council for the period from 16 November 2018 to 15 May 2019 are unfounded and give us cause for concern. In its paragraph 29, the Report says that the “European Union’s policy of conditionality, linking membership progress to full cooperation with the Yugoslavia Tribunal and Mechanism, remains a key tool for ensuring cooperation with the Mechanism.” This position aspires to shape the political context of Serbia’s cooperation with the European Union, while legal arguments are replaced with political ones. The Mechanism is perceived as a tool for exercising political pressure. Neither the Prosecutor nor the Mechanism are entrusted with such a mandate.
Serbia has had successful, widely-acclaimed cooperation with the Mechanism: it fulfils the obligations it has assumed and has enabled the Mechanism free access to all evidence, documents, archives and witnesses; all the Mechanism’s requests have been attended to and timely replies and the documentation requested from the archives of Serbia’s State organs have been forwarded to the Mechanism’s Prosecutor, its Chambers and Secretariat; and witnesses have been allowed to testify waiving their right not to on account of State, military and/or official secrets.
In the last reporting period, Serbia has made progress with regard to the activities related to the so-called legacy of the Tribunal by responding to the call made within a Belgrade information centre establishment project which is to house ICTY materials and make them accessible to the general public.
Ever since the inception of the Tribunal, my country’s cooperation has yielded positive results and its own judicial system has been changed and improved in the process. Making Serbia’s progress to Euro-integrations conditional on extraneous issues would send a message that all those years of hard work and exceptional results have not been
The Report, though, hammers on the non-prosecution of higher-ranking perpetrators on and on even though the persons transferred to the Tribunal included the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, President of the Republic of Serbia, Vice-President of the Federal Government, Vice-President of the Government of the Republic of Serbia, 3 former Chiefs of the General Staff of the Army of Yugoslavia, former Head of the State Security Service and many military and police generals. Nothing like that was requested from any other country. For others, there was no political will. Legal reasons were there, surely.
This matter, though, is of no relevance for the international legal order on which the United Nations is based.
There is no doubt that there is a need for the countries of the region to work together on mutual understanding, cooperation and reconciliation. Our future, stability and economic development should be predicated on normalization of relations rather than on political conditionality. The insistence, therefore, on the conditionality in the Report, especially against the backdrop of extensive achievements made in the cooperation with the Mechanism, is unfair and hence unacceptable.
Mr. President,
Cooperation in our region is in the ascendant and is best illustrated by the following facts.
Serbia’s cooperation with Bosnia and Herzegovina in the field of legal assistance is at a high level. A number of requests for legal assistance has been exchanged with the Prosecutor’s Office of that country in the period from 1 November 2018 to 1 July 2019. The Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina has submitted 29 requests, 25 of which have been complied with, while the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor of the Republic of Serbia has submitted 45 requests, 28 of which have been replied to. Serbia’s Prosecutor’s Office has taken over 3 indictments from the competent authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Our cooperation with Croatia, we hope, will also improve. Two Commissions were established in the wake of a meeting of Justice Ministers of the two countries in March 2018 and tasked with exchanging the lists of persons indicted or sentenced for war crimes and with drafting a bilateral crimes trials agreement. The first of the two Commissions has completed its task, while the other one held a number of meetings, the last one in Belgrade last week. Another ministerial meeting was held in Zagreb last February. The meetings and the work of the Commissions are important steps forward in addressing outstanding bilateral issues between Serbia and Croatia.
The State's Attorney Office of the Republic of Croatia submitted 21 requests, 9 of which have been complied with, while 11 are under consideration. The Office of the War Crime Prosecutor of the Republic of Serbia submitted 18 requests, 6 of which have been replied to, while no reply has been received to 12 requests. These numbers are indicative of progress achieved compared to the previous reporting period when no reply was received from Croatia to any request for evidence and information.
Also, meetings of the War Crimes Prosecutor of the Republic of Serbia with her colleagues in the region provide evidence of ongoing regional cooperation that my country is engaged in. The Regional Prosecutors’ Conference on Cooperation, Benchmarks and Standards in the Prosecution of War Criminals was held in Belgrade last May. In addition to the high-ranking officials of the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Offices of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, the Mechanism’s Prosecutor also took part in the Conference.
Therefore, we find it difficult to subscribe to the assessment of the Report made in the second part of its paragraph 81 that “regional judicial cooperation in war crimes matters in not satisfactory…” On the contrary, compared to the previous reporting period, that cooperation is much more extensive today.
The adoption of the 2018-2023 Prosecutorial Strategy for the Investigation and Prosecution of War Crimes in Serbia highlighted the importance of the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor as the primary organ for a more efficient and effective prosecution of war crimes. The Government has provided the resources to improve the capacities of the Office and increase the number of employees and Deputy Prosecutors.
The Mechanism Prosecutor’s Office also rendered support to improving the work of the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor. The Mechanism’s prosecutors were invited as instructors to a 5-day training course for Deputy and Assistant Prosecutors in Belgrade last April. The course was organized by the Serbian Judicial Academy and provided practical training for investigation in criminal prosecution of sexual violence in conflicts as international crime.
The War Crimes Prosecutor raised 6 indictments in the period from 1 November 2018 to 1 July 2019. 3 of them have been taken over from the competent authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Currently, 20 cases are being tried, while 54 persons in 6 cases are investigated. In the reporting period, the Higher Court in Belgrade delivered judgments in 5 cases, while the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor reached a guilty plea agreement with one person. All persons involved are Serbs. Serbia continues its practice of no trial in absentia with respect to war crimes committed against the Serbian population. 27 cases which include 132 persons have been suspended on that basis.
Mr. President,
In light of the efforts to make my Statement informative and bring before you my county’s cooperation with the Tribunal and the Mechanism, which is second to none, I feel disappointed by the contention from paragraph 83 of the Report in which it is said and I quote: “Nonetheless, it is of significant concern that as of the present, no senior- or mid-level official has been held accountable […] for the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 civilians in Kosovo in March and April 1999.”
The allegations of ethnic cleansing and of 800,000 civilian victims thereof have been made in very poor taste. The allegations are wrong, while number games lead to blind alleys of bias and partiality and are often fraught with far-reaching and unforeseeable consequences. These narratives have been churned out by propaganda mills to vindicate the 78-day bombing of my country exactly twenty years ago. The brutalization took place without any reason and was carried out, this Council knows very well, without its decision.
Nobody seems to be held to account or found guilty for the victims of this monstrous act for the loss of thousands of human lives in which evidence has been collected through the judicial system of Serbia, except that the highest-ranking Serbian officials have been sentenced by the very Tribunal for criminal offences committed in the territory of Kosovo and Metohija. Their crime was the defence of their country.
Let me remind you that, under UNSCR 1244 (1999) of 10 June 1999, Kosovo and Metohija has been under the protectorate of the United Nations, the institution in which we have convened today. Due to the widely-known circumstances and the existence of United Nations civil administration (UNMIK) has judicial competences over this part of Serbia’s territory. Yet, each and every attempt of my country to have war crimes committed against its population in Kosovo and Metohija investigated and their perpetrators brought to justice has yielded no result. Nobody has been held accountable for the persecution and killing of Serbs and other non-Albanians. Justice for the victims of war crimes in Kosovo and Metohija continues to be unattainable.
Since their establishment by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government (PISG) in Priština, the Specialist Chambers and the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague have made no progress whatsoever.
Likewise, the EULEX Prosecutor’s Office in Priština extended no request for assistance to the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor in Belgrade in the period from 1 November 2018 to 1 July 2019. However, under the Mutual Legal Assistance Procedures, the Serbian Prosecutor’s Office extended 16 requests to the EULEX Office, out of which only 1 request has been replied to. This prevents the crimes committed against Serbs and other non-Albanians to be prosecuted and tried and is surely one of the reasons that no one is called to account for the persecution of the Serbs of Kosovo and Metohija.
Mr. President,
Persons who have been sentenced before the Tribunal and served their sentences cannot be the subject-matter of the Mechanism Prosecutor’s Report to the Security Council. Upon presentation of an indictment and, finally, upon delivery of a judgment, the Prosecutor’s job is ended. After service of a sentence, no one can be further sanctioned for whatever reason, nor can he/she be deprived of a personal or civil right.
Let me bring to the Council’s attention another very important question. As I said at the beginning of my Statement, certain tendencies taking shape at the time the Mechanism is about to close its work may change the decades-long practice of serving the sentences passed by the Tribunal and the Mechanism. It is my opinion that this question should be resolved before the Mechanism folds its mandate.
The indications that certain changes will occur in respect of early release affect, in an indirect way, the initiative of Serbia, launched more than 10 years ago, to have its nationals sentenced before the Tribunal serve their sentences in Serbia. This initiative has been motivated by Serbia’s resolve to take over the responsibility for the serving of prison sentences passed to its nationals by the Tribunal. The purpose of a punishment includes, among others, re-socialization of the sentenced persons. I am of the opinion that it is hard to expect that this purpose will be achieved if the persons serve their sentences in faraway countries, the language which they do not speak and in which the possibility for them to receive visits of, and contact, relatives is reduced to a bare minimum.
The situation in Serbia has changed drastically since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. I highlighted this fact in my previous Statements to the Council and during the visits of the Mechanism’s officials to Belgrade. Last November, I was reassured by then President of the Mechanism Theodor Meron that there are no obstacles to the realization of this initiative of Serbia. I was advised to direct the initiative towards the Security Council which established the Tribunal and the Mechanism.
In my Statements in June and December 2018, I proposed that the Secretary-General of the United Nations request the Mechanism to prepare a comprehensive assessment of the problem in order to make it possible for the Security Council to proceed and reviews the existing practice relative to the serving of prison sentences and make a decision on requisite changes.
Serbia is ready to accept a strictly defined international monitoring and provide clear guarantees that the sentenced persons will not be released early short of an appropriate decision by the Mechanism or another organ of the United Nations to be entrusted with this matter in the future.
I call, once again, on the Mechanism’s representatives and on the representatives of the relevant institutions that the Secretary-General may appoint for this purpose to visit Serbia, tour its penitentiary institutions and inspect them themselves.
Distinguished Members of the Security Council,
We would welcome if this esteemed institution presented its position on the question of the serving of sentences by the persons sentenced before the Tribunal. It would be a very good sign. I, therefore, call on the Security Council to get actively involved. By the realization of the initiative, a positive message would be sent that perpetrators can re-socialize through serving sentences in the country of origin.
In conclusion, let me point out that Serbia’s cooperation with the Mechanism evolves successfully and that my country has no outstanding issues with the Mechanism. I continue to believe that our efforts will be recognized and reflected objectively in the next Reports. I hope I am not overly optimistic in that belief.
Thank you, Mr. President.
