Author of the application of BiH for revision of the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the lawsuit against Serbia, David Scheffer, presented his view on the reasons that caused the rejection of the application, as well as the legal arguments that were offered to the ICJ in order to prove the responsibility of Serbia in the war in BiH.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) rejected the application for revision of the judgment on Thursday, the 26th of February 2007, with which would be re-opened one of the most important cases of genocide in BiH during the war from the beginning of the 1990’s.
The application for revision was submitted to the registrar of the ICJ in the Peace Palace in The Hague on the 23rd of February 2017. The agent of BiH who submitted the application for revision was Sakib Softic, who was appointed on the 4th of October 2002 by then Presidency. On the 4th of November 2002, when the ICJ started with oral observations, the Court, without any hesitation, treated Softic as the agent in the case of the revision at the request of Serbia.
There was communication between Softic and Registrar of the ICJ in May 2016, during which the registrar of the ICJ stated his view that Softic should be re-appointed for the application for revision. To be honest, we believe that the Registrar’s provision was not based on the Statute, rules, and practice of the ICJ. The President of the ICJ expressed different view in his statement from the 9th of March 2017, when he informed that the Court considered the content of all communications on the 2nd of March 2017 “demonstrated that there is no decision made by the governing institutions on behalf of BiH as a state, which would be applied for revision of the judgment of the 26th of February 2007 … “This indicates a totally different meaning: lack of institutional decisions to file an application for revision. Therefore, there is no decision of the ICJ on the need for the appointment of Softic as the agent.”
In his letter from the 24th of February 2017, the Registrar of the ICJ noted the position of the team of Softic, which included me as a deputy, that his “appointment as the agent in the original case from the 4th of October 2002 should be applied to every related case in the future, and that there is no need for a new letter of appointment “.
The tragedy of what was revealed in recent days is complicated by the reality that the truth about what happened in BiH in 1992, when the Serbian army, supported from Serbia, banished hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from large territory of BiH, and thousands of them were killed, could finally be told. This is the result of the fact that the evidence of the crime of genocide against Muslims, used as the most powerful weapons with the aim of ethnic cleansing, were presented to the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the case against Ratko Mladic.
However, Mladic’s case also represents a new opportunity for the ICJ to revise Serbia’s role in encouraging crime back in 1992. Ten years ago, the ICJ ruled in the case of BiH against Serbia that Serbia violated the Convention on Genocide for failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 and not punishing Mladic for the crimes, while he was hiding somewhere in Serbia.
The long-awaited judgment for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian President who was accused of genocide during 1992 and many other crimes, was prevented before the scheduled date of its publication due to his sudden death. Therefore, the ICTY never revealed their seeing of events that are associated with Milosevic. Mladic and president of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic were indicted for genocide in 1995.
ICTY will soon decide whether Mladic and Karadzic are guilty of genocide in 1992. The application for revision is prepared to offer needed opportunity to ICJ to examine the evidence in order to first decide whether genocide took place in 1992, and then the responsibility of Serbia in accordance with the Convention on Genocide. History will not be favorable regarding the ICJ’s decision to reject the application for revision.
(Source: faktor.ba)
