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Saturday, November 15, 2014

Is nothing sacred any more?


This makes me wonder if there were more individuals tried at The Hague who were also subjected to the kind of shameful injustice as carried out at the ICTY.
According to ICTY's website they describe their work and themselves as: 
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is a United Nations court of law dealing with war crimes that took place during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990’s. Since its establishment in 1993 it has irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law and provided victims an opportunity to voice the horrors they witnessed and experienced.
In its precedent-setting decisions on genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Tribunal has shown that an individual’s senior position can no longer protect them from prosecution.
It has now shown that those suspected of bearing the greatest responsibility for atrocities committed can be called to account, as well as that guilt should be individualised, protecting entire communities from being labelled as “collectively responsible”......
Below just a few paragraphs from the full article which goes to show how deep and wide is the corruption at the ICTY and it does not take a genius to wonder if the virus is also prevalent in the main body the ICJ ,or whether the virus has actually spread from it to its many branches.

Stephen Karganovic writing at VineyardSaker blog:
....Tainted from the outset, the case against Vojislav Šešelj began to really unravel once the trial started. It turned out that “expert” witnesses brought by the prosecution were a parade of half-wits and ignoramuses or, in Šešelj’s own memorable courtroom phrase referring to prosecution experts, “If they know less than I do about the subject matter of their expertise, they have no business being here.” The alleged percipient witnesses to Šešelj’s crimes were an unmitigated disaster for the prosecution, and their performance was marked by wholesale perjury. The vast majority admitted in court, under Šešelj’s merciless cross-examination, that they were blackmailed, pressured, or suborned to give false evidence against him under the direction of the prosecutor. One even revealed in open court that prosecution investigators had promised him access to “girls” if he agreed to give incriminating evidence against the defendant. Many prosecution witnesses, apparently relieved that they could finally do so in the relative safety of open court, withdrew large portions or all of their previously given statements and one, to the apparent amazement of the judges, requested permission to walk over to the defendant and to embrace him. 

The prosecution of Vojislav Šešelj, more than any other scandalous proceeding at ICTY, illustrates the true nature of the Hague Tribunal and symbolises most clearly its institutional corruption which was best encapsulated by the distinguished authority John Laughland in the title of one of his books: travesty. 

Oh, yes, and haven’t we forgotten to mention the official charges against Vojislav Šešelj? Not at all, they just happen to be completely ludicrous and of negligible import in relation to the gross subversion of basic legal principles that the conduct of his trial in all its phases represents. The defendant stands accused of “inciting” to violence and ethnic persecution in his political statements, an offence that is not even listed as a crime in the Tribunal’s Statute, any more than is the elusive doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterprise, which in any event would be regarded as legally protected free speech from any but a politically vindictive point of view. ......

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