The Manual of Best Practice by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, which has been produced through cooperation between The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and the Hague Tribunal, was publicly presented at a regional conference on “Promoting the Legacy of International Tribunals” on 15 June in Sarajevo.
Participants at the two-day conference included Patrick Robinson, President of the ICTY, Raimondo de Cardona, Ambassador of Italy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ferdinand Kopp, Head of the Operations section for Justice and Home Affairs and Public Administration Reform at the European Commission’s Delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina, a large number of judicial institutions from the Balkans, and representatives of international and hybrid tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Lebanon.
The Manual is the first publication to provide a comprehensive description of the most efficient and innovative practices developed by the Hague Tribunal since its establishment.
Addressing the participants, Ferdinand Kopp said that EU accession by the Western Balkan countries will only be possible if they fully confront recent tragic events, find war criminals and bring them to justice. “These criminals changed peace societies into war societies and commited heinous crimes against humanity, but this is only one of the reasons why full coperation of the countries of former Yugoslavia with the ICTY is so important, and why it is a condition for possible accession. There is another reason – the European commitment to justice and understanding of justice and the moral obligation to secure justice for the victims,“ said Mr.Kopp.
“The legacy of the ICTY must be preserved by the continued prosecution of war criminals by domestic jurisdictions in the former Yugoslavia. In that respect, this Manual is particulary aimed at sharing with those jurisdictions the practices of the Tribunal. But it also has a much broader purpose and that is to provide information from those intimately involved in the process to all national and international jurisdictions faced with the task of prosecuting war crimes, in the hope that they may also be helped in their task by the practices and lessons learnt by the ICTY,” Fausto Pocar, former President of the ICTY and Sandro Calvani, UNICRI Director, wrotee in their Foreword to the Manual.
