"Relevant institutions should establish who was involved in that. I can do nothing about it. I only know that as far as Croatia is concerned, it has always met its international obligations," President Mesic told reporters on the margins of a conference of parliamentary speakers from the Southeast European Cooperation Process (SEECP) countries in Zagreb on Monday.
Geoffrey Nice, the chief prosecutor in the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, said in a letter to Jutarnji List daily published on Sunday that in 2003 Del Ponte had agreed to grant protection measures for a reasonable part of documents of the Supreme Defence Council of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), without the prosecution having previously studied those documents. Nice opposed this at the time, considering it an unnecessary concession to Belgrade.
President Mesic recalled that the ICTY has a liaison office in Croatia and that the office has always submitted all the necessary evidence to the ICTY in a transparent manner.
PM Sanader said that relevant information should be studied and a decision made.
"If it is established that somebody (did this) in an institution that was established by the United Nations, and which Croatia requested to be established... then the matter should be discussed by the body which established that tribunal," Sanader said.
The Party of Rights (HSP) today urged the government to raise the issue of criminal liability of the Hague tribunal's chief prosecutor on suspicion of abuse of office.
HSP MP Pero Kovacevic told reporters in the parliament headquarters that the government should request a debate in the UN Security Council about the work of Del Ponte and her office, as well as the re-examination and quashing of indictments against Croatian generals and six Bosnian Croats. The HSP official said his party would also urge a parliamentary debate on the relationship between the Croatian state leadership and the Hague tribunal prosecution.
The Forum of Croatian Unity, a civil society association chaired by Davorin Rudolf, sent an open letter to Sir Emyr Jones Parry, chairman of the UN Security Council, asking the UN body to urgently request from Del Ponte and publish a detailed report on Nice's claim that she had acted on her own and without any legal grounds and allowed the FRY government to censor parts of transcripts from sessions of the FRY Supreme Defence Council on Serbia's involvement in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The leader of the Democratic Centre (DC), Vesna Skare Ozbolt, said that if Nice's allegations proved true, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina should ask the UN Security Council to make those documents public.