The judges’ patience is wearing thin: on Friday, the accused was warned that the Chamber would be compelled to curb the time for cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, unless he takes their advice seriously and stops wasting court time. The alternative is for the trial to run into 2020


The trial of Radovan Karadzic should not take longer than 30 months, according to the schedule the ICTY president presented to the UN Security Council last year. Based on the first seven weeks of its case, the prosecution has very little chance of completing it in this time. If the trial proceeds at this pace, the prosecution would not rest for 75 weeks!

The calculation is very simple: in the seven working weeks, the prosecution has managed to hear eight witnesses, only two percent of the total of 400 witnesses on its list. The April statistics shows that the prosecution took less than 20 percent of the total court time to examine its witnesses; Karadzic took more than 70 percent for his cross-examination. Since the prosecution has in the meantime cut down the time for the examination of its witnesses, contenting itself for the most part with reading out the summaries of their written statements which are then admitted into evidence, the May statistics will probably be even more damning.

Although the judges said on the eve of the prosecution case that Karadzic’s estimates of time he would need to cross-examine the witnesses were ‘unreasonable and unrealistic’, over the past seven weeks they have allowed him to exceed the time he had asked for. For instance, he took more than 12 hours to cross-examine Colm Doyle, and he had initially asked for ten hours. As presiding judge Kwon said at the end of the hearing on Friday, the judges gave Karadzic some leeway because he is ‘not a trained lawyer” and ‘effective cross-examination could be a very difficult skill to master’. Perhaps the judges have been hoping that Karadzic would, if given enough time, realize that he lacks that specific skill and would let one of his legal advisers handle the cross-examination.

The judges have over the seven weeks warned Karadzic time and time again to refrain from making comments, statements and speeches, from asking ‘open-ended questions’ because this method is ‘bad and inefficient’, that only the witnesses’ answers count as evidence, not the documents he has shown to the witnesses that they know nothing of. One of the witnesses complained to the judges that in the seven times he had testified before the Tribunal no one had ever asked him such ‘muddled’ questions as Karadzic. The observers at the Tribunal, including a number of lawyers, say that even General Tolimir, who is also defending himself, is doing a better and more efficient job in the cross-examination of witnesses than Karadzic.

The judges’ patience is wearing thin: on Friday, the accused who is on trial for genocide and other serious crimes in the war in BH, was given the last warning that the Chamber would be compelled to curb the time for cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, unless he takes their advice seriously and stops wasting court time. If the trial of the former Republika Srpska president continues at this pace, it would run into 2020; this is a luxury the Tribunal cannot afford.

Sharing