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Yesterday, May 28, a letter of FREEDOM
Association has been handed over to the Embassies of United States of America
and United Kingdom in Belgrade UNDER PROTEST.
Today, the same letter will be handed to
all other Embassies of the UN Security Council member countries. The
Security Council is formally responsible for the works of the Hague "tribunal",
but has no mechanism of monitoring of the works of its own Frankenstein
child. Annual short discussions in the SC with the President and Main Prosecutor
of ICTY, who usually report on number of cases processed and necessary funds is
certainly not enough to judge the works of this legal monster. In the same way,
e.g. managers of a concentration camp could submit their reports. This situation
is very dangerous, but it is not strange, since the SC (nor even the General
Assembly) has no judiciary power, so it can not transfer it to its
subsidiary organ.
With the "trial" of Slobodan
Milosevic, number of political and legal misuses and malfunctions in ICTY
rapidly and shamefully increased. ICTY discredits the very idea of international
judiciary.
So it's high time for concrete action of
Bars' Associations and Chambers, Law Faculties and Institutes, interested
NGOs and all honest and decent lawyers - to expose the primarily political
nature of this US/NATO instrument of aggression called "tribunal" by exposing
how little it has in common with internationally accepted standards and
principles of fair trial and human rights protection.
Experts' opinions, further independent
research and even forming of commissions to evaluate all violations of law by
ICTY, and especially in the case of Slobodan Milosevic, are
needed.
Therefore we call upon all committees for
the defense of Slobodan Milosevic world wide and all friends of justice to act
in that direction.
Lawyers' community in SC member countries
should be particularly concerned, and should submit to their governments
concrete recommendations for abolishment of this ad hoc "court" which puts on
trial political leaders of the people that opposed NATO and blinds the eyes over
the massive crimes committed by NATO itself.
Hoping that letter submitted today by
FREEDOM Association, and written by Belgrade law experts, who follow the "trial"
in The Hague can serve as good first impulse for such activities, we present
below its content:
In the proceedings conducted against
Slobodan Milosevic before the illegal Hague Tribunal established contrary to the
Charter of the United Nations, more and more is getting disclosed the true
nature of this institution, the frightening malignant tumor in the tissue of
civilization created by the mankind for centuries, and a serious offence against
law and justice for which numerous generations have been aspiring and building
with great efforts.
Brought to a deadlock and discredited by more and more evident
preposterousness of the accusations against Slobodan Milosevic, by total
incapability of the Prosecution and by the farce into which the "procedure of
presentation of evidence" has transformed and in which, up to now, not a single
testifying had any legal and probative value and because of which every
observer, even the least interested, cannot help experiencing the feeling of
shame, the Hague Tribunal personified in the Trial Chamber presided by the
increasingly nervous judge Richard May, is more and more desisting even from the
illusion, present at the beginning of the "trial", of valuing the form, and is
more and more seriously and drastically violating the rights of Slobodan
Milosevic guaranteed to him by international law, and even laid down in the
Statute and the in the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of this illegal Tribunal.
In addition to the wearing-out tempo of the trial and exhaustion by
worthless evidence, coupled by simultaneous limitation of the most elementary
rights and needs, such as adequate rest, walks in fresh air, regular and timely
meals, etc., which is increasingly getting the features of torture (prohibited by Article 7 of the
International Covenant on Civic and Political Rights and a set of other
international documents), in addition to limitation of the time for examination
of witnesses and interventions of the Trial Chamber's presiding judge whenever
the witnesses face difficulties due to the lack of logic and contradictions in
their false statements, which (contrary to Article 14 of the International
Covenant on Civic and Political Rights) violates the principle of
contradictoriness and the right to defence, in addition to accepting and
non-sending away the witness having no direct knowledge about the topics on
which they testify (almost all witnesses are such, while only one testifying was
eliminated because of indirectness), in addition to violating the presumption of
innocence (envisaged by Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civic and
Political Rights) by proving one set of alleged criminal offences by other
criminal offences not identified by the Tribunal (for example, "expert"
statistician Patrick Ball was proving by "statistical methods" that movements of
the Albanian population from Kosovo and Metohija had been caused by terror and
murders committed by the army and the police, without having been such murders
established in any court proceedings, and that their "existence" and the
"places" where they were "committed" were actually only the "supposed" ones on
the grounds of the "statistical methods" used – in which process, according to
the extensively defined system of command responsibility applied before the
Tribunal, all such imaginary acts and their alleged consequences are
automatically charged against the then President of the Republic), in addition
to very late submission of the documents and disclosure of identity of the
witnesses and of the contents of their statements, in addition to abrupt changes
in the order of testifying whereby the right to defence is limited (envisaged by
Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civic and Political Rights), the
Hague Tribunal has recently started submitting to Slobodan Milosevic very
extensive and complex documents relevant for the trial, and for his defence as
well, only in the English language and without translation into Serbian in which
way his right envisaged by Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civic and
Political Rights is violated, as it is also violated pursuant to Articles 21 of
the Hague Tribunal's Statute and 66 of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of
this illegal court. Thus, as many as 38 folders containing documents on the
exhumation of corpses, with highly complex technical terminology were submitted
to Slobodan Milosevic only in English, while the photos contained in the folders
were given to the "accused" in the form of photocopies, black and white and thus
indiscernible, and not in colors as their originals that the Prosecution and the
Trial Chamber dispose of. On the basis of the documents in these folders a
finding of expert witness, Dr. Erick Backar, was prepared, he testified before
the Tribunal and Slobodan Milosevic had to cross-examine him without adequate
preparation for the defence.
This last case of the violation of Slobodan Milosevic's rights represents
more than a serious warning that these illegal proceedings before the illegal
tribunal are transforming into an open violence against the "accused", the
violence that will by all indications be more and more severe, because the time
and the course of the "proceedings" are increasingly disclosing the falseness
and fabrication of all charges against Slobodan Milosevic.
In view of all of the above said, and in particular the most recent
violations of Slobodan Milosevic's rights, we are inviting all justice-loving
public and all decision-making factors in Yugoslavia and in the world to oppose
the violence against Slobodan Milosevic and to advocate accomplishment what the
law and justice bid, which is: FREEDOM FOR SLOBODAN
MILOSEVIC To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sps.org.yu/ (official SPS website) http://www.belgrade-forum.org/ (forum for the world of equals) http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend Slobodan Milosevic) http://www.jutarnje.co.yu/ ('morning news' the only Serbian newspaper advocating liberation) |
