Subject: Letter from Emma Bonino addressed to the Italian foreign minister Beniamino Andreatta
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0 -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: The Transnational Radical Party List
Sir:
the Ad Hoc International Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, inaugurated in
The Hague on November 17th 1993, risks not becoming operative or beginning
its work too late. According to the officials, the main reasons for this
are all of a financial nature.
The Commission of Experts, established by United Nations Security Council
Resolution n. 780 of October 1992 and currently chaired by Professor Cherif
Bassiouni, was given a deadline by which it was to conclude its work: April
1994. This decision is incomprehensible at first sight since the commission
itself has informed the Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, and the latter the
Security Council, that the action plan cannot be concluded before the end
of July 1994. The main reason underlying the decision to anticipate the
conclusion of the Bassiouni Commission's investigative work on the crimes
seems to be the lack of financial resources to keep the Voluntary Trust
Fund operating.
President Bassiouni a few days ago sounded an alarm. He first of all
disclosed an intolerable situation, i.e. that the Commission lacks a budget
since January 1, 1994. As you may well imagine, this entails the
impossibility of planning any type of study, work, survey and on-site
gathering of evidence and testimonies.
Secondly, President Bassiouni underscored a banal but essential technical
fact: that the excavation of the bodies buried in mass graves (which are
now covered with a layer of ice) and especially in that of Vukovar, where
the bodies of 204 Croatian soldiers slaughtered by the Serbian besiegers
have allegedly been thrown, cannot be carried out by April, i.e, during the
rigorous Balkanic winter. According to the initial action plan, between
January and July the Commission was to continue the investigations on the
cases of rape and sexual assault and on the crimes committed in the area of
Prijedor, and proceed with the excavation of bodies from the mass graves in
the western and eastern sector of the UNPA. It is a well-known fact that
such investigations benefit only from the funds of the Voluntary Trust
Fund.
One of the most important aspects of this deplorable situation is that if
the commission were to be forced to discontinue its activity by want of
funds, the first to suffer serious repercussions would be the Tribunal
itself, which in turn is awaiting the passage of its preventive budget by
the UN General Assembly. In the January-July period, the Bassiouni
Commission is scheduled to work in cooperation with the General Prosecutor
and his staff to provide the essential probatory elements on the basis of
which to start judicial proceedings: creating the Tribunal's database, and
thus transferring previously filed documents from Chicago to The Hague, and
training the personnel that is to work in the Court.
In conclusion, the commission of experts needs an extra $300,000 allocation
for the activities which have already been planned in theory and that are
to be carried out between January and July 1994. To that end I am
submitting two requests. The first is that part of the $3 billion Italian
liras allocation to the Tribunal, passed by Italian Parliament as part of
the budget bill, be immediately transferred and placed at the disposal of
the Commission of Experts. The second is that Italy promote an initiative
with the United Nations General Assembly with the purpose of solving the
situation of stalemate on the question of the financing of the Ad Hoc
Tribunal. A decision on the part of the General Assembly on the preventive
budget of $35 million proposed by the Secretary-General has long been
expected.
The existence and effective functioning of the Ad Hoc Tribunal on
ex-Yugoslavia are essential, and not just to bring justice to the victims
of the crimes committed in the Balkans. The Ad Hoc Tribunal of The Hague
could be the first step towards the creation of a Permanent Criminal
Tribunal, and thus for the actual achievement of an international order
based not on military and political force, but on the force of the law.
What is at stake in The Hague, in other words, is once again the
credibility of the United Nations as the creator of a new model of world
government where legality may finally replace arbitrariness.
May I underline, lastly, that February 15th is the date by which the
various national governments must send their written comments to the United
Nations Secretary-General on the draft statute of the Permanent Criminal
Tribunal drawn up by the International Law Commission. The initiative of
the national governments on the subject is an essential contribution to
step up the drawing up and approval of the Statute and to achieve the
approval of the Statute by the General Assembly already in the forthcoming
session of September 1994.
The Radical Party believes that the existence of a new international
community should be made visible and that this, while still largely
incapable of acting unanimously in international crises, should at least
prove to have a common consideration of human dignity, without connivances
or complicities with the authors of the most serious crimes, and keep a
position of strict neutrality and indifference to the reason and the party
in which they acted. The Nurnberg Trial was the brain-child of the
victorious powers; the Tribunal for the crimes in ex-Yugoslavia has trouble
becoming operative as a "single work" of international justice of the
Security Council, and yet we cannot imagine a sustainable development in
the future in a world without justice. In conclusion, we hope you will
agree on the fact that it is urgent to acquire that "ounce of legality"
whereby war crimes will be punished internationally.
