UN war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz told Serbian Justice Minister Nela Kuburovic on Thursday that Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia need to upgrade regional cooperation and the powers of their war crimes prosecutors.

Brammertz is on a two-day visit to Serbia as part of preparations for his regular report to the UN Security Council in June.

The Belgian lawyer was chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and now holds the same post at the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT).  

According to a Justice Ministry press release, Brammertz said the adopting of a national strategy for war crimes procedures and a prosecution strategy was a good thing but warned that more efforts have to be invested in implementing them and starting new cases.  

Kuburovic told the UN prosecutor that Serbia is fully committed to processing war crimes, adding that regional cooperation is at a high level, especially with Bosnia. She said Serbia and Croatia had formed two commissions charged with war crimes and had exchanged lists of war crimes suspects.  

Kuburovic said the Serbian judiciary was ready to take over the case against Serbian Radical Party (SRS) officials Vjerica Radeta and Petar Jojic who were charged by the ICTY with coercing witnesses in the war crimes trial of their party leader Vojislav Seselj.  

The Serbian Justice minister recently sent a letter to the UN MICT, expressing readiness to take the two to trial.    

Brammertz also met with President Aleksandar Vucic who said that cooperation with the UN MICT would continue despite disagreements.   “They concluded that current cooperation is satisfactory but that Serbia needs to speed up the implementation of its obligations and activities in arresting suspected war criminals,” a press release said.