TrainingBIRN Summer School BIRN Network About us
BIRN Newsletters
You can subscribe free of charge to Balkan Insight, BIRN's weekly
online publication analysing and investigating important developments in
the region.
Subscribe
30 03 2007 Having attended the hearings in the Spanovic case, I was very interested to read your article on it. The report raised serious issues about the case. However, there are a number of points that should be made.
It is to be emphasised that the decision was made on passage
of time grounds. As your report accurately states, Judge Tim
Workman considered that the time elapsed since the original crime meant that
witness memory may be faulty and so on. The anonymous
officials referred to who believed this it to do with in absentia mass trials
are incorrect. Workman made no comment in this regard to that at all, in
the passage of time reasons, and it was wrong of the officials to infer
otherwise.
Further, Ben Ward of Human Rights Watch considers it to be "unfortunate if
the decision was seen as an endorsement of the view that it's not possible to
fairly prosecute war crimes committed in the Balkans in the early
1990s". Like it or not, that is
effectively what the decision does.
Indeed, given that the Judge did not say his view was limited to the wars in
the former Yugoslavia, let
alone this case, this precedent could be applied to many other conflicts, such
as Rwanda
or World War 2. That is why it is controversial.
The article states that the Workman quoted from Human Rights Watch reports and
that human rights are likely to be relevant in future hearings.
This needs clarification. He did not quote any reports. He mentioned
Human Rights Watch concerns of ethnic bias in Croatian prosecutions and
attached weight to them.
However, he made it clear that he gave
greater weight to the European Court of Human Rights decision in the case
of Tomic, which was brought to his attention by the Croatian government. Human
rights reports were cited in this case to support Mr Tomic, an ethnic Serb whom
the UK wished to deport back
to Croatia.
The court ruled against Mr Tomic.
Mr Workman did say that had he not ruled extradition would be unjust on grounds
of passage of time, he would have asked for further information on whether the
amnesty in Croatia
operated to a degree of arbitrariness which would have infringed Spanovic's
rights. That may indeed raise the issue of mass trials in absentia.
However, it is the only human rights point he would have considered, and we do
not know how he would have ruled. It may very well become important if the
'passage of time' reasons are overturned on appeal but it is not why the
current decision has been made.
As it stands, the decision had nothing to do with mass trials in absentia, or
other human rights concerns. Workman made it clear that it was about passage of
time, because Croatian and British officials knew where he was and - more
importantly - that he considered that as the crimes occurred during what he
termed a 'civil war', memories would have faded and evidence hard to
reconstruct etc.
This makes British policy something of a mockery, given the huge pressure it
has placed on Croatia - but not Serbia - in the past on war crimes
issues. And human rights groups will have a problem in criticising Croatia
or others over those issues when the British
judiciary is suggesting that war crimes
trials after a period of time are unfair.
Brian Gallagher
London
At the beginning of 2010 BIRN network published Digging Deeper - A Guide for Investigative Journalists in the Balkans, written in cooperation with Sheila Coronel, Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and professor of professional practice at Columbia University, New York.
