Today, Justice Minister Nela Kuburović received the President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals Theodor Meron who was on his farewell visit to Serbia, as he was retiring in mid-January 2019. President Meron found the Mechanism to have a very good cooperation with the Government of Serbia which he believed would continue to be the case once the future Mechanism President was onboard. He explained that the Mechanism was continuing its work on the four cases concerning Serbia.
Minister Kuburović stressed that Serbia had responded to all the requests of the former ICTY and now the Mechanism, having provided them both with hundreds of thousands of documents. She again raised the matter of Serbia’ request that Serbian citizens serving sentences in inadequate conditions – a finding confirmed in several instances by the International Committee of the Red Cross - be granted transfer to serve the remainder of their sentences in Serbia with the Mechanism’s constant supervision. She noted that the request had even been made by the UN Security Council several times, which never received a positive response from the Mechanism given its position on the matter.
Meron himself expressed concern over the treatment of certain convicts serving their sentences in Estonia and said that the possibility of having them relocated to another country was being considered. He added that he and one other fellow judge had been in favour of the request for years, but that the majority of the judges were not.
Minister Kuburović also pointed out that a decision on the Amicus Curiae appeal to the referral of the case of two radicals, Vjerica Radeta and Peter Jojić, to Serbia had been pending for months, once again stressing the willingness and the capability of the Serbian authorities to conduct the trial.
The interlocutors also discussed the possibility of the Mechanism returning documents which Serbia had originally provided to the former ICTY, but which were never used as evidence in any of the trials, and of forming an Information Centre in Belgrade which would facilitate access to the ICTY Archives.