The press conference hold on Tuesday, 17 August in the UN headquarters in
New York by Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General and Tiphaine Dickson,
international criminal lawyer from Montreal on behalf of 90 lawyers and law
professors from 17 countries, demanding immediate end of the serious and
dangerous violation of International Law in the case of President Slobodan
Milosevic (the press conference was hosted by New York historian Barry
Lituchy on behalf of the ICDSM-US) produced and is still producing lot of
public effect and among the international lawyers community in particular.
Below we reproduce the Associated Press story on the press conference.
Experts Urge U.N. on Milosevic Defense
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Wednesday August 18, 2004
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) – Ninety legal experts from 17 countries urged the
United Nations, in a petition drafted by a Canadian lawyer, to allow former
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to continue defending himself against
war crimes charges, warning imposing a defence lawyer against Milosevic’s
wishes would violate international law.
Canadian international lawyer Tiphaine Dickson, who drafted the petition,
said the UN tribunal prosecuting Milosevic is trying to impose a defence
counsel to strip him of a defence “that may be embarrassing” to the court.
Asked whether they should be making legal arguments on Milosevic’s right to
defend himself, given their belief he is not guilty, Dickson insisted the 90
legal experts who signed the petition came “from every sort of political
persuasion” and “the vast majority” are not members of the International
Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.
The jurists, law professors and international criminal lawyers -including
former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark and French lawyer Jacques
Verges -said in the petition to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the General
Assembly and the Security Council, even if Milosevic has heart trouble he
still has the right to defend himself.
“Illness does not destroy his right to defend himself in person,” Clark told
a news conference Tuesday at the UN Correspondents Association.
The petition calls for Milosevic’s provisional release so he can receive
adequate medical treatment and warns having an outside lawyer take over his
defence “will only increase his hypertension and place his life at risk.”
Milosevic’s trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, on 66 counts
of war crimes, including genocide, began in February 2002 and has stalled at
the halfway point because of his heart problems.
When the trial resumes Aug. 31, the judges are expected to rule on two ways
to speed up proceedings -forcing Milosevic to accept a defence lawyer and
splitting the trial to separately cover conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and the
Serbian province Kosovo during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Milosevic and UN prosecutors rejected the idea of breaking up the trial,
said court documents filed late last month. But prosecutors have long
advocated the idea of imposing a defence lawyer -a move Milosevic bitterly
opposes.
In their four-page petition, the legal experts accused the UN tribunal of
compounding Milosevic’s medical problems by refusing his right to
provisional release on grounds all defendants are presumed innocent until
proven guilty, by providing “unrealistically short preparation periods” for
his defence and by introducing “an inordinate quantity of prosecution
evidence.”
These three factors increased Milosevic’s stress level, “the principal
trigger of his illness,” the petition said.
Now that Milosevic’s health is deteriorating, the tribunal is seeking to
impose legal counsel on him over his objections, “rather than granting him
provisional release in order to receive adequate and proper medical care, a
reasonable measure reflected in domestic law and international practice,” it
said.
Imposing a defence lawyer would violate Milosevic’s rights under the statute
of the Yugoslav tribunal and also under the International Covenant for Civil
and Political Rights, they said.
“The United Nations should not tolerate these continuing violations of
international law in the name of expediency,” it said.
“Using a detained person’s inappropriately treated illness as an excuse to
infringe upon his rights and silence him and embark upon a ‘radical reform’
of the proceedings -as the chamber is now considering, by changing the rules
in mid-trial and to the defendant’s detriment -is a perversion of both the
letter and spirit of international law,” the petition said.
“The man is innocent,” Clark said.
“He should be able to prove his innocence.”
