STILL STANDS
by the UN and the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials set up to prosecute those behind the Nazi regime.
Its “every step, procedure, formality was under the microscope. It had no room for mistakes”, Subotic wrote on the website of the EU-supported Balkan Transitional Justice project. “That Praljak was able to smuggle a liquid into the courtroom despite heavy security “truly beggars belief,” Subotic wrote.
Other observers were quick to urge people not to allow the dramatics of one man — a former theatre and movie director — to hijack the court’s legacy or to push aside the victims of his crimes.
While Praljak’s suicide will “go down as part of the ‘lore’ of the ICTY, I don’t think it will cast much of a shadow, if any, on its legacy,” Mark Kersten, a researcher into international criminal justice, said.
“People are too smart. I believe they will see through Praljak’s antics and remember that he died a convicted war criminal, brought to justice for heinous crimes committed against vulnerable civilians.”
A formal high-profile closing ceremony for the court is planned on Dec 21. And the tribunal, which helped establish the facts of what happened in the conflicts, has itself vaunted that it “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law”. Subotic argued that “the most damaging consequence” of Wednesday’s events was how the defendants yet again “make the proceedings only about themselves”.
“Instead of talking about what Praljak was convicted of, about his many victims and the horrors they endured, we talk about him,” she wrote.
Since its establishment, the ICTY has indicted 161 people, all of whom have appeared before the court, and 90 people have been sentenced in cases which have helped write international jurisprudence for prosecuting the world’s worst crimes.
“I do not believe that this detracts from the legacy of the ICTY,” said former US ambassador for war crimes issues, Stephen Rapp.
He pointed to Adolf Hitler’s designated successor, Hermann Goering, sentenced to death by hanging in October 1946 at Nuremberg. But Goering escaped what he considered a humiliating end for a soldier by swallowing cyanide just hours before he was set to be executed.
“But the judgment there still stands for all history in establishing the facts and in showing that the perpetrators of atrocities will be held to account,” Rapp said. AFP