Responding to the objections, the prosecution requested turning down the objections, stating that the legal issues raised by defence counsel had already been solved with rulings of the Appeals Chamber in other cases, while the other issue raised by defence counsel concerned the establishment of facts and therefore could not be the subject of pre-trial motions, but had to be dealt with at the trial.
The prosecution submitted their response to the trial chamber on February 1.
In January defence teams representing the generals submitted motions challenging the tribunal's jurisdiction over the case, and Gen. Gotovina's attorneys also objected that the indictment was imprecise and not supported by material evidence.
The indictment charges the three generals with crimes committed against the Serb population before, during and after Operation Storm, from July to November 1995, in an ethnic cleansing campaign devised as part of a joint criminal enterprise.
The defence motions contest that the prosecution's evidence supports the allegation that there was a state of armed conflict at the time and place relevant to the indictment, from which it follows that the prosecution is applying international law wrongly.
The prosecution said in its response that the issue of establishing the existence of an armed conflict was not a matter of jurisdiction but of establishment of facts and therefore should be discussed at the trial instead of during pre-trial proceedings.
Gotovina's lawyers challenged the prosecution's right to establish the responsibility of their client in conditions when there was no international armed conflict.
The prosecution said in its response that Gotovina's attorneys were wrongly treating crimes against humanity, with which their client is charged, as violations of the laws and customs of war, and recalled that the Hague tribunal had already established that it had jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, regardless of whether they were committed in an international or an internal armed conflict.
Gotovina's defence team challenges the tribunal's jurisdiction on six grounds.
It challenges the prosecution's criterion according to which Gotovina is responsible because the crimes were a "probable consequence" of the joint criminal enterprise. What arises from this is that every commander would be criminally liable because the probability of crime always exists, the defence team says. The applicable criterion at the Hague tribunal is narrower, the defence team says, only if the crime was a "foreseeable consequence".
The prosecution claims in its response that the indictment charged Gen. Gotovina only with foreseeable consequences.
Defence teams in a number of cases at the tribunal tried to challenge the tribunal's jurisdiction on different grounds, but so far to no avail.