Transferring the archive of the UN's court for former Yugoslavia to Sarajevo would be a “very bad and unacceptable decision,” according to attorney Miodrag Stojanovic, who said the court's archive does not refer to Bosnia only but to the territory of whole ex-Yugoslavia.
“Why would it be delivered to Sarajevo and why would be one of the directly interested parties in the past war be enabled to have direct access and control over the archive? That would be a bad and unacceptable move,” he stressed.
Stojanovic is on the defence team of Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of war crimes in the first-instance trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was succeeded in 2017 by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).
The attorney said the Hague-based court had decided not to hand over its archive to anyone in the region but to keep it there and enable electronic and direct access to all interested parties.
But, media earlier reported that a part of the ICTY's official archive, including original copies of the court verdicts, were stored in Sarajevo's City Hall.
The city authorities and the court representatives previously agreed to establish a special information centre at the City Hall, where the documents would be kept.
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“The archive which the centre received will additionally strengthen its (the court's) importance and contribute to the process of transitional justice on these territories, to the fight against the denial of war crimes and prevention of revisionism,” the City Administration then said.
