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Bosnian Serbs to hand over documents to Hague war crimes court
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina, June 3 (News Agencies) - Authorities in Bosnia's Serb republic said Sunday they will hand documents to the UN war crimes court relating to several cases of Serbs suspected of war crimes during the 1992-95 Serb ethnic-cleansing of Muslims.
The documents, relating to cases which had been investigated by the Serb military courts, will be the first against Serb war crimes suspects to be officially given to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Sinisa Djordjevic, an advisor to the Bosnian Serb premier, told the French news agency AFP the documents are not related to trials of already arrested suspects, but "are new ones."
"No later than within a month we will go to The Hague with a draft law on cooperation (with the ICTY) and five to 10 cases in which we find there is a reasonable doubt for existence of war crimes committed by Serbs," Djordjevic said.
The Bosnian Serb military courts, which were dissolved last year, were investigating the cases back in 1992 and 1993, he added. He did not give further details.
He said that Bosnia's Serb entity also expected the ICTY to transfer "several Serbs from The Hague to Republika Srpska (RS, the Bosnian Serb entity) where trials would continue before RS courts."
He said the transfer, which would take place in September at the earliest, would involve three or four Bosnian Serbs, considered by the tribunal to be among smaller cases.
The ICTY would very likely monitor the continuation of the trials, which started in The Hague, in Republika Srpska, Djordjevic stressed adding that the UN court observers "would be able to see if we respect the agreement... and legal norms."
If the draft law on cooperation between Bosnian Serbs and the ICTY, which the entity's parliament will consider within a month or so, is adopted as proposed, the Bosnian Serb authorities might participate in some operations of suspects' arrests and transfers to The Hague, Djordjevic explained.
The arrests could continue to be done by the NATO-led peacekeepers, but if the ICTY asks RS authorities for help in certain cases then there would be "an obligation to arrest these persons, take them before an investigative judge, who would check their identity and indictment."
The suspects could be then either transferred to The Hague or remain to be tried in Republika Srpska, Djordjevic concluded.
Under the Dayton accord, which ended the Bosnian war, the Balkan country was split into two entities -- the Bosnian Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.
The ICTY has repeatedly accused Republika Srpska authorities of providing shelter to prime suspects indicted for war crimes committed during the war, notably Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic.
The ICTY, created by the United Nations in 1993 to judge human rights violations in former Yugoslavia, has publicly indicted 71 people, of whom 25 are still at large.
So far 47 people have been transferred to the court. Nineteen people have been convicted and two acquitted.
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