Prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice sent a letter to Jutarnji List, which was published on Sunday, in response to an article published in The New York Times last Monday, which claimed that in a genocide lawsuit brought by Bosnia-Herzegovina before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague Serbia had withheld some of the crucial evidence of its role in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war by denying the top UN court access to some of the transcripts from sessions of the Yugoslav Supreme Defence Council with the permission of the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor.
Carla del Ponte's bargain with Belgrade had no legal basis. It was an unnecessary deal which Belgrade used to conceal the evidence of Yugoslavia's involvement in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina from the ICJ and its own public. On the other hand, the new government in Belgrade had nothing against this material being used against Slobodan Milosevic in a closed session, Nice said.
Not only did the prosecution get nothing out of that deal, but they set an undesirable precedent because after that Belgrade started to apply the same conditions to similar documents and with success, because Mrs Del Ponte personally approved such initiatives from Belgrade, he added.
The decision approving protective measures came personally from Mrs Carla del Ponte. In a letter to the then Yugoslav foreign minister Goran Svilanovic in May 2003, she gave approval for protective measures for a reasonable part of the collection of Supreme Defence Council documents without anyone from the prosecution previously examining those documents.
Noting that he had warned Del Ponte against making concessions to Serbia, Nice said he had wanted to use the documents in open trial sessions and that therefore it was no coincidence that exactly at that time Belgrade tried to reach a deal through Mrs Del Ponte to strengthen its position in the legal proceedings before them.
The New York Times said that "in the spring of 2003, during the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, hundreds of documents arrived at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague marked 'Defense. State Secret. Strictly Confidential.' The cache contained minutes of wartime meetings of Yugoslavia's political and military leaders, and promised the best inside view of Serbia's role in the Bosnian war of 1992-1995."
Serbia "obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive - those who have seen them say incriminating - pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal's public records," the newspaper wrote.
Later on, the ICJ found in its verdict that the massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the UN-designated safe haven of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in the summer of 1995 constituted genocide, but that there was lack of evidence showing that the Serb forces had acted under instructions from or under the effective supervision of Serbia.
"The ruling raised some eyebrows because details of Serbian military involvement were already known from records of earlier tribunal cases," the New York Times said.
Six years after Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia also sued the then Yugoslav federation of Serbia and Montenegro for violations of the Convention on Genocide.