Investigating judge Ratko Scekic confirmed to Hina today that the Zagreb County Court had received the letter from the Hague-based UN war crime tribunal which asked that, via the Office of cooperation with the ICTY, Domagoj Margetic should be summoned to the court to take over the injunction. The judge, however, did not want to speak about the contents of the injunction.
Scekic explained that the file was labelled as classified and that this case was referred to judge Renata Milicevic.
Reporter Margetic told Hina that he did not know about the injunction's contents, but that he assumed that this would be about the Hague tribunal's request for "taking protective measures" against him after he published a list of all the protected prosecution witnesses from the trial of Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic on his website three weeks ago.
This controversial reporter claims that he has obtained the witnesses' list from an assistant to the ICTY Chief Prosecutor and that the list has been declassified.
"Yesterday my website was closed, and the U.S. company over whose web portal my site was available informed me that it removed my web pages following an order from the Hague tribunal," Margetic said.
He added that he would not take over the injunction which Judge Milicevic is due to deliver to him at 0900 hrs Friday.
I am going to invoke a provision of the constitutional law on cooperation with the ICTY which regulates the implementation of the process for the assessment of whether all is in line with the Constitution before meeting requirements for cooperation, Margetic added.
In mid-June, the prosecution of the ICTY withdrew indictments against Margetic and another two Croatian journalists - Stjepan Seselj and Marijan Krizic -- who were charged of having revealed the identity and testimony of a protected witness at the Blaskic trial in December 2004 in a weekly. The witness in question was the incumbent Croatian President Stjepan Mesic.
However, the ICTY prosecution stuck to prosecuting former chief editor of the 'Slobodna Dalmacija' newspaper, Josip Jovic, for contempt of court which he allegedly committed when he published the transcript in question of Mesic's testimony in his newspaper in December 2000.
At the start of this year, the Zagreb police pressed charges against Margetic for having published Mesic's testimonies on his Internet site which was closed as soon as the police initiated the proceedings against the reporter.
After that Margetic said that he would opened his web site on an American server so as to scupper attempts by Croatian authorities to influence contents of his website.