"There is no conflict or dispute between the DORH and the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor," the DORH said in a statement on Wednesday.
The statement was prompted by an article published in the Wednesday edition of Vecernji List daily, which says that "the main reason why the DORH has not yet forwarded the indictment against Rahim Ademi and Mirko Norac to the tribunal is its dispute with the Hague tribunal's prosecution."
The newspaper wrote that ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte was insisting that the Croatian indictment against Ademi and Norac should include a reference to the so-called joint criminal enterprise in the same way the indictment against Generals Ante Gotovina, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac and the indictment in the Jadranko Prlic and others case did.
"The DORH rejects the allegation and the conclusion by the author of the article about the alleged dispute and conflict, and does not want to comment on the other allegations because the process of takeover of the case and adjustment of the indictment is still in progress," the statement said.
The DORH said that it had received on several occasions documents from ICTY prosecutors relating to the Ademi and Norac case and that its work on adjusting the tribunal's indictment to Croatian criminal legislation was at a final stage.
It added that the adjustment process was not simple as often portrayed by the media "because the takeover of documents is still in progress and there are minor points of law that need to be clarified regarding (differences in) the concept of guilt and modalities of command responsibility between the ICTY's and the Croatian indictment and regarding the legal inability to directly transpose into the Croatian indictment count 1 of the ICTY indictment concerning the crime of persecution on grounds of discrimination."
The DORH said that the public would be duly informed of the date of submission of the Ademi and Norac indictment.
Spokesman for the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor Anton Nikiforov declined a request by Vecernji List for a comment, saying that what was currently going on between the two prosecutors' offices was not a matter for the media.