ABSTRACT: Emma Bonino expresses satisfaction for the UN Security Council's decision to establish the international tribunal against war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia and says she hopes it will become a permanent body.

(IL GIORNO, May 27th 1993)

I welcome the UN Security Council's decision regarding the creation of an international tribunal against war crimes. Namely, it is important that the project of the Secretary-General of the United Nations has not been amended. The project has this way incorporated the provisions of the Italian project, especially as far as the exclusion of the death penalty and contumacious judgment are concerned, thus providing wider guaranties for the defendants and ensuring greater effectiveness of judgment.

This is a first breakthrough within the application of the international law. A step ahead towards the constitution of a world order based on the rule of law and on the legality of human rights.

Nonetheless, as underlined during the meeting with Mr Boutros-Ghali in New York last week, there are a series of problems pertaining to the actual functioning of this tribunal, first and foremost as far as its financing is concerned. The actual establishment of the tribunal, the hope that it can become a permanent body in the future, will be among the requests which the radical party will express at the Vienna Conference on human rights next June. It is an event that takes place only 300 kilometres from the places where those same rights are being trampled.

The war in the former Yugoslavia will clearly not be solved by means of a war crimes tribunal. I have never believed this and I believe no one has ever advanced this hypothesis.

I have often wondered, and would like others to wonder, what would happen if, placed in the condition to prosecute the crimes committed in ex-Yugoslavia immediately, the judges of the tribunal were to prosecute Seselj, for instance?

Perhaps a public outcry at the international level; perhaps it would trigger the application of that repressive principle which is indispensable to affirm the international law. Perhaps, last but not least, it would draw the attention of the public opinion and of the media on a tragedy which has become such also thanks to the passivity of Europe and international indecision.

I invite the media not to underestimate the scope of this decision taken by the Security Council.