In her address before the Council for the Implementation of Peace in BH, Tribunal’s Chief Prosecutor warned the fugitives that, with every day they delay the surrender, their chance of being tried before domestic courts and being held in domestic prisons grows ever greater. Karadzic, Mladic and Gotovina are the “priorities in 2005.” New indictments will be “a new challenge for the BH authorities”


Chief Prosecutor of the Tribunal in The Hague Carla Del Ponte urged the fugitives from international justice today to hurry up with their surrender. She noted that “the sooner they surrender, the greater their chance to be tried in The Hague and to serve their sentence in an European country.” The later they get out of the “woods in which they hide”, Del Ponte said, the greater the chance that their trials will be left to the domestic courts and their sentences served in domestic prisons. In any event, they will not escape justice.

In her address before the Council for the Implementation of the Dayton Accords, Del Ponte urged the representatives of BH and the international community gathered there to focus on the “known priorities – Karadzic, Mladic and Gotovina.” Ten years after Srebrenica killings, the Dayton accords and the indictment against Karadzic and Mladic, the continued freedom of these accused would be “a very bad signal for the future of the region”, she said. Bringing them to justice, as she said, should be the “main goal” of all the relevant authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. To this end, the “efforts of intelligence services and the police” should be joined and effective controls should be established at the border between BH and Montenegro. Del Ponte reveals that in talks she held separately with the ministers of the interior of Republika Srpska and Montenegro in the past few days, it was agreed that “close and effective cooperation between their ministries should be established immediately in the effort to locate fugitives from international justice.”

Del Ponte intimated that the new indictments she signed at the end of last year, that are currently under review, will “be a new challenge for the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. The Chief Prosecutor is hoping that when the indictments are submitted to the relevant authorities “everything will be carried out in a proper way.”

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