Jovica Stanisic i Franko Simatovic in the courtroom

The appellate hearing in the case against Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, former Serbian State Security Service chiefs, has been scheduled for 6 July 2015. In a few days’ time, we will know whether Stanisic and Simatovic will appear in court in person. They have to specify whether they will attend the hearing by 19 June 2015.

On 30 May 2013, Stanisic and Simatovic were acquitted on all counts in the indictment charging them with participation in the joint criminal enterprise aimed at the ethnic cleansing of parts of Croatia and BH. Presiding judge Alphons Orie from Holland and Judge Elizabeth Gwaunza from Zimbabwe voted for their acquittal, with French judge Michele Picard dissenting.

The former chiefs of the Serbian State Security Service were acquitted because the judges applied the standard of ‘specific direction’, established in Momcilo Perisic’s appeals judgment. The Appeals Chamber led by Judge Theodor Meron found that the assistance the accused Perisic had provided, in his capacity as the chief of the Yugoslav Army General Staff, to the Krajina Serb and Bosnian Serb armies had not been ‘specifically directed to the crimes’ committed by the troops but had been provided to support their war effort. A similar standard was applied in the trial judgment in the Stanisic and Simatovic case: while the judges found they had assisted the units that had murdered, deported, forcibly transferred and persecuted people, their assistance was not ‘specifically directed’ to the crimes.

The appellate proceedings promise an interesting final outcome. The presiding judge in the Appeals Chamber is now Fausto Pocar. He was a member of the Appeals Chamber that considered the case of Nikola Sainovic and other Serbian and Yugoslav officialswhich eventually fully rejected Meron’s doctrine of ‘specific direction’. The appellate judgment in the Sainovic et al. case noted that the doctrine was not in line with the jurisprudence of the Tribunal in The Hague. Moreover, the doctrine was ‘directly and essentially contrary to the current jurisprudence and customary international law’. Meron’s doctrine has also been rejected by the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone in the appellate judgment in the Charles Taylor case.

‘Specific direction’ and other findings in the trial judgment in the Stanisic and Simatovic case will be discussed on 6 July 2015 at a hearing that will last from 10am to 4:30pm. The hearing will open with 10-minute address of the presiding judge. The prosecution will then have an hour and a half for its arguments. The defense teams will have one hour each for their presentation. Finally, the prosecution will have another 30 minutes, and the defenses 10 minutes respectively to respond to each other’s arguments.

In its appeal the prosecution has stressed that the trial judgment must be reversed as the two Serbian State Security Service chiefs ‘should either receive adequate sentences or the case should be referred to the Trial Chamber for a retrial with the application of adequate legal standards’. The appellate judgment is expected by the end of 2015.

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