Tara McCormack The Milosevic trial: a travesty of justice A new book shows how the international community undermined every legal principle in its desperate bid to convict the former Yugoslav leader.
Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice by John Laughland
The vast majority of what passes for analysis of the Yugoslav break-up and wars, and later events such as the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), is marked by a blatant disregard for either evidence or accuracy. In stark contrast, John Laughland's excellent book on the ICTY and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is a powerful critique based upon a detailed analysis of both the procedures and rules governing the ICTY in general, and Milosevic's trial in particular.
It is difficult to do justice to the utter arbitrary lawlessness of the ICTY. In the first place, the ICTY is not a court as is generally understood nor can it be compared to apparently similar bodies like the International Court of Justice. The ICTY is an explicitly prosecutorial institution, in which the Office of the Prosecutor is part of the Tribunal and is set up, in its own words, for the 'sole purpose of prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia'.
Laughland shows us an institution staffed by judges who often have little experience of criminal law, let alone international criminal law. For example, American judge Gabrielle Kirk Macdonald was amazed to be asked to serve on the ICTY. When she protested that she did not know anything about international war crimes, she was told that that was immaterial and that she would learn. We can only speculate as to how much experience British judge Richard May (who presided over Milosevic's trial) garnered in international criminal law and international relations from his experiences as a crown court judge on the Midland and Oxford Circuit. Other judges have been entirely without any kind of judicial experience but have been law professors, legal advisers or even, in the case of the Turkish judge, a diplomat.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3469/
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Ismail Lagardien
As if the US will EVER listen to ANYONE who disagrees with it (not to anthropowhatsisname the country :-)))))
MIAMI, June 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday. "I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N6B384799.htm