“I was once beaten up so badly, I spent four days in a coma. I was thrown out onto a heap of corpses, and I was found there by one of my comrades.”

“I was once beaten up so badly, I spent four days in a coma. I was thrown out onto a heap of corpses, and I was found there by one of my comrades.” This is the testimony of just one victim of the Yugoslav wars who testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague. Chief Prosecutor, Belgian Serge Brammertz held talks with MEPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee on 26 January. We spoke to him.
One of the most crucial aspects of the stabilisation of the successor states of Yugoslavia has been the carrot and stick of potential future EU membership. Slovenia has already joined and Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro all want to follow suit.

However, cooperation with the ICTY is a precondition of progress towards EU membership.  This is why the European Parliament regularly monitors developments in the region.

One of the key areas of discussion on 26 January was what to do should fugitives like Serb General Ratko Mladić and Serb Goran Hadžić continue to evade the Court.

What are the overall lessons learned from Tribunal's work?

You know, we are not yet at the end of the process, probably it is too early to have a final conclusion. I think it is clear that by having indicted 161 persons the tribune has played a major role in addressing the crimes committed in the region.

Of course the Tribunal in its initial phase had a number of organisational, logistical problems to deal with. But I think at the end of the day if we look at the number of cases prosecuted I think it has been quite successful.

In a broader context, you know that after the Tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone and Cambodia we have the International Criminal Court (ICC).  I think the experience with the ad hoc tribunals has played a major role in the creation of the ICC as a permanent tribunal.

Suffering cannot be put into numbers, but give us some idea of the scale of the Tribunal's work?

We have millions of pages of documents at the tribunal. We have thousands of victims who have testified during these 16 years. Figures are relative and differ in terms of victims. There are victims who have lost their lives, victims of rape, victims who lost their families. 

The entire region is a victim of the crimes committed by a number of individuals and the entire region is still suffering politically.

Given that Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić are still at large, when do you think the ICTY will finish its work?

The only good scenario is that the fugitives are arrested during the lifetime of the Tribunal, which means the next two or three years.

In the worst case scenario, the UN Security Council is working on the so-called residual mechanism - a kind of institution to be created after the closure of the Tribunal, which will deal with remaining requests of assistance for witness protection. This mechanism will also have a tribunal component - a kind of a “sleeping tribunal” to be activated if one of the fugitives is arrested at a later stage.

I think the message that the Security Council and the international community really wants to give is that whenever, wherever the fugitives are arrested there will be a judicial mechanism to deal with them.