"Even without those transcripts, when Croatia would succeed in establishing the genocide by means of documentation it already possesses, it would probably manage to prove that responsibility (for genocide) lies with Belgrade," Ivan Simonovic told Jutarnji List on Sunday.
The transcripts came into the limelight recently when The New York Times raised the question why the ICJ delivered a verdict in Bosnia-Herzegovina's genocide lawsuit against Serbia without gaining an insight into uncensored transcripts. The New York Times ran an article saying that during the trial before the ICJ in The Hague, Serbia had concealed some of the key evidence of its role in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-1995, withholding from the highest UN court a part of transcripts from sessions of the Supreme Defence Council, with approval from the ICTY prosecution.
Several days ago, the chief prosecutor in the trial of the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic before the Hague-based war crimes tribunal wrote to Jutarnji List saying that ICTY chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte made a deal with Belgrade which it used to conceal the evidence of Yugoslavia's involvement in the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In his interview for the Vecernji List daily on Sunday, Ivan Simonovic commented about accusations Nice levelled against Carla del Ponte.
Asked whether Nce's accusations had an echo in the UN Security Council, the Croatian legal representative answered that this institution was "less and less interested in the matters of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia".
Prospects of Croatia's lawsuit against Serbia before the ICJ will not significantly change following Nice's statement, Simonovic told Vecernji List.
According to Simonovic, what is yet to be done is to accurately establish the relevance of censored documents and "this can be done only by means of detailed analyses of each document."
He added that to clarify any controversial issue and to collect additional evidence was not only important for Croatia's case before the International Court of Justice but also for the history and process of establishing the truth.