Rebic and Marijacic, a reporter from the city of Zadar, were indicted on 10 February 2005 for revealing the identity and statement of a protected witness in the case against retired Bosnian Croat general Tihomir Blaskic.
The prosecution witness Cameron, a former Canadian police officer who has been working for the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal since 1998, testified about an analysis of documents which he had conducted as part of an investigation against Marijacic and Rebic.
Alongside his testimony, the chief prosecutor in this case, Rebecca Graham, also presented documents which served as the basis for the indictment, namely a controversial article in the Zadar-based 'Hrvatski List' weekly of 18 October 2004 which disclosed the identity and statement of a protected witness who testified in the Blaskic case on 16 December 1997.
Cameron confirmed the authenticity of other documents such as a transcript of a statement of another protected witness in the Blaskic trial whose statement was published in the Split-based 'Slobodna Dalmacija' daily in November and December 2000, articles which the indictee Marijacic published while working for the Slobodna Dalmacija, the tribunal's orders forbidding the disclosure of the names and statements of protected witnesses and other pieces of evidence.
On Monday, the ICTY Appeals Chamber decided to annul all protective measures which had been applied in the case of witness Johannes van Kuijk, a former Dutch member of UN peace forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose statement on an unsuccessful attempt by Bosnian Croat Miroslav Bralo a.k.a Cicko to turn himself in to the UN troops (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia, was published by the Zadar-based Hrvatski list weekly.
The Appeals Chamber established that Van Kuijk should not have been covered by the court order on the protection of witnesses in the Blaskic trial as he was not a resident of the former Yugoslavia.
This order is one of the three orders with whose violations Marijacic and Rebic have been charged. Consequently, the decision of the Appeals Chamber facilitated the defence of the two indictees.
Their defence lawyers Marin Ivanovic and Kresimir Krsnik today denied that their clients were covered by those court orders. The lawyers explained that one of the orders was given orally at a closed-door session during the Blaskic trial, while the other sought discontinuing the publication of transcripts of testimonies by another protected witness at the Blaskic trial, which were published in the Slobodna Dalmacija daily and the Zagreb-based Globus weekly in December 2000.
Marijacic's lawyer Ivanovic claimed that no order was directly addressed to the 'Hrvatski List' weekly or his client.
Krsnik claimed that contrary to the allegations from the indictment, his client Rebic had never been a member of Blaskic's defence team and thus could not have been bound by the order regulating the protection of witnesses and their statements.
Prosecutor Graham tried to introduce, as a piece of evidence incriminating Rebic, a news item released by the Croatian news agency Hina on 27 April 2005, after the Rebic indictment was issued.
According to the prosecutor, in the news item Rebic said that he had revealed the identity of the protected ICTY witness with the intention of proving that neither he nor Croatia had hidden ICTY indictee Miroslav Bralo Cicko.
Lawyer Krsnik challenged the authenticity of the evidence, saying that investigator Cameron obtained the news item from 'Index', an Internet portal in Croatia, and not directly from the news agency.
The prosecutor promised to get the original news item from Hina until tomorrow, and the Trial Chamber postponed the decision on whether the evidence could be admitted until tomorrow, when the hearing resumes.
The defence lawyer expressed satisfaction with the course of the trial, particularly with the Appeals Chamber's decision.