"The Council strongly supported the recent messages delivered by the Commission in Belgrade and Sarajevo that full cooperation with the ICTY must be achieved to ensure that the SAA negotiations are not disrupted," the EU Council said in its conclusions.
"The Council urged both Serbia and Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina to take decisive action to ensure that all remaining fugitive indictees, notably (Bosnian Serb wartime leaders) Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, are finally brought to justice without delay," it said.
The next round of SAA talks with Serbia and Montenegro is scheduled for 5 April. A source from the Commission who attended the debate said that there was a risk of the talks being disrupted unless full cooperation was achieved by then.
Asked if full cooperation meant the handover of Ratko Mladic to the Hague tribunal, the source said that full cooperation was an activity leading to the handover.
The EU Council fully supported the efforts and initiatives of Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajcak, the personal envoy of the EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana. Lajcak is charged with organising a referendum on independence in Montenegro.
The Council also supported the start of talks on the final status of Kosovo. The meeting between representatives of Belgrade and Pristina, which took place in Vienna on 20 and 21 February, showed "the preparedness of both sides to engage constructively in the Kosovo Status process," it said.
The Council urged the Kosovo authorities "to achieve in parallel with the Status process concrete and rapid progress on Standards implementation, particularly regarding the protection of minority communities."