Briefly Noted
By IWPR staff in The Hague (TU No 390, 21-Jan-05)
Briefly Noted
By IWPR staff in The Hague (TU No 390, 21-Jan-05)
The resolution will allow ad litem judges to continue to work until their cases are completed, tribunal spokesman Jim Landale said at a press conference.
The pool of ad litem judges, each serving four-year terms, was created in June 2001 to speed up tribunal proceedings. The decision to extend their mandates was recommended by tribunal president Judge Theodor Meron to ensure the tribunal completes all its trials by the 2008 deadline.
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Prosecutors at Serbia’s domestic war crimes court have filed an indictment against a Kosovar Albanian, Anton Lekaj.
Court spokeswoman Sonia Prostran told IWPR that the prosecutor’s office issued the indictment, which contains charges of war crimes against civilians, on January 14. The document will now be sent to Lekaj and his defence lawyer, Prostran said, who will have a chance to enter any objections before it is reviewed by a panel of three judges.
Details of the charges included in the indictment will not be made public until that process – which can last as long as a month - has been completed, she added.
Serbian media outlet B92 said the charges relate to an attack on a Roma wedding in the Kosovo municipality of Djakovica on June 12, 1999. They report that Lekaj is accused of killing four people and involvement in acts of rape and torture.
He is already in a Belgrade prison after being arrested in Montenegro for allegedly trying to steal a car.
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Savo Todovic, former deputy commander of the Foca Kazneno-Popravni Dom prison, exercised his right to postpone entering a plea for 30 days during his initial appearance before the tribunal on January 19.
He stands accused of 18 counts of crimes against humanity, violations of the laws or customs of war and grave breaches of the Geneva conventions relating to his time working at the facility in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where large numbers of non-Serb men were detained for long periods.
He is said to have been in charge of selecting detainees to be beaten, interrogated, used for forced labour, kept in solitary confinement, exchanged and killed. To this day, some 300 inmates remain unaccounted for.
Todovic was transferred to The Hague on January 15, having handed himself in to the authorities in Republika Srpska.
He is the first ever war crimes suspect to be extradited by the Bosnian Serb government, which has been coming under mounting pressure to cooperate with the tribunal.
Another man, Milorad Krnojelac, was arrested by NATO troops in June 1998 and sentenced by the appeals chamber in 2003 to 15 years in prison for crimes committed while he was commander of the same camp.
A third, Mitar Rasevic, is currently in detention in The Hague, accused of having acted as commander of guards at the camp. Prosecutors have asked for him to be tried in the domestic courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
