As Mladic trial ends, court’s future in question

With world’s atrocities, more courts could appear

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — When a panel of U.N. judges hands down a verdict next week in the trial of former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic, it will mark the end of a groundbreaking era in international law. Yet a new age of international justice is already underway, with other temporary courts and tribunals springing up around the world to prosecute atrocities.

Mladic’s trial is the last at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was set up in 1993 to prosecute crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.

Over 24 years, it has sent dozens of war criminals to jail — from lowly soldiers and prison camp guards to former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic — and it developed key jurisprudence in prosecuting atrocities.

Mladic, who insists he is innocent, faces a maximum life sentence if convicted Wednesday of crimes including genocide.

What the Yugoslav court hasn’t done, however, is stop such crimes from happening.

Allegations of mass murders and persecutions from the past and present are mounting around the world — from Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war to the carnage in Syria to abuses seen against Rohingya Muslims who fled by the hundreds of thousands as their towns and villages were torched in Myanmar.

This means the list of locations for future temporary courts is growing ever longer.

Just this week, a report by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the advocacy group Fortify Rights found there is “mounting evidence” of genocide against the Rohingya. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. was deeply concerned by “credible reports” of atrocities committed by Myanmar’s security forces and called for an independent investigation.

David Schwendiman, an American prosecutor investigating allegations of organ trafficking and other crimes during Kosovo’s independence struggle, believes the U.N. tribunal trying Mladic is unlikely to be exactly replicated in the future because of its size and cost. Still, he says the age of impunity for mass atrocities is over.

“The international community has decided … there is going to be criminal accountability for people in the world for people who … do the kind of things that are happening in Myanmar and (are) doing the kinds of things that are happening in Syria,” Schwendiman said. “That’s a given now.”

The court where Schwendiman aims to bring prosecutions — known as the Kosovo Specialist Chambers — could be an example of how war crimes cases will be handled in the future.