OPATIJA: MANY UNSOLVED ISSUES ABOUT ICTY

OPATIJA, May 8 (Hina) - Presentations of foreign legal experts at an international symposium on the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which is being held in the northern Adriatic town of Opatija Monday and Tuesday, demonstrated there were plenty of unsolved issues in relations of countries and international institutions with The Hague Tribunal. Herwing Roggemann of the Frei University in Berlin said the conflict between the international judiciary interest for getting evidence and the interests of national security and secrecy was one of the main conflicts on the long path of creating an efficient international judicial authority. In the lack of an international judicial authority, the solving of a case when a country refuses to cooperate with the ICTY citing endangered national interests would be taken over by a political body, the United Nations Security Council. The Council should, in the capacity of a superior court, rule on where the balance between obligations of a state to cooperate with the ICTY and obligations of a state to protect its national interests is. According to Roggemann, positive or negative outcomes of searching for solutions of the issue could determine whether an international crime tribunal will start functioning. Roland Bank from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg pointed to the fact that jurisdiction of the ICTY over representatives of international institutions which were active in areas in which war crimes were committed, has not yet been entirely defined. Only in the case of an international mission in the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo has a more precisely defined obligation of cooperation between international organisations and the tribunal been established. Planck recalled this was about persons with first hand information, who could determine the course of court proceedings. Goeran Sluiter from the Dutch Institute for Human Rights in Utrecht said that in practice there were still obscurities about the establishment of a legal foundation for the obligation in line with which countries should cooperate with the ICTY. According to him, it was necessary to clarify the possibility of using requests, court injunctions and subpoenas in relations between the court and countries. Several attendants stressed that the trial of the former commander of the Central Bosnia Operation Zone, Tihomir Blaskic, established some principles in relations between the Tribunal and countries, however the relations needed still to be defined. (hina) it jn lml