FORMER JUDGE CRITICISES ICTY JUDGES

WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Hina) - A former US judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Patricia Wald, said her former colleagues were partly responsible for slowness and omissions during trials before the Hague-based tribunal. The majority of ICTY judges are not judges by profession but legal experts or diplomats with law degrees, Wald said in an interview published in the New York Times on Thursday. She said her successor Thomas Meron was one of those judges. Meron is a professor of international humanitarian law at the New York Law School. One certainly would not have an eminent anatomy professor perform a brain operation, said the 73-year-old judge, who worked two years as an ICTY judge. In her opinion, the concept of the ICTY as an institution which should establish the norms of international law is wrong. Explaining their verdicts, some judges write about 30 or more pages of legal theory, often copying their own research papers, Wald says. The ICTY, however, is primarily an international criminal court in charge of sentencing people to long-term imprisonment, Wald said. According to her, the international court should only deal with political and military leaders, such as Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, while national courts should deal with other cases. (hina) it sb