At first blush it is hard to have much sympathy for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s latest compliant this week that the international court hearing 11 charges against him in The Hague is denying him a fair trial. After all this was also the gripe of that other infamous character of the tragedy of the 1992-95 Balkans conflict, Slobodan Milosevic.
But Karadzic’s plea to be allowed more time to prepare his defence against what are the most serious of charges and that include two counts of genocide, is in fact an entirely legitimate one. And the conduct of those prosecuting Karadzic and the presiding judges has to date smacked of their wanting to get the show on the road so they can swiftly deal with this defendant at the expense of fundamental principle of fairness.
At the heart of Karadzic’s complaint is that while he has been held in custody for 14 months, prosecutors took until May this year to serve on him a staggering 1.3 million pages of evidence. In essence then he has been expected to read, analyse, determine whether or not to object to the admission of any one of these pages between then and late October when the court wanted to start his trial.
Even allowing for the fact that Karadzic is being a little too cute in claiming to be self-represented because he does have a team of legal advisers behind him, it is patently unfair to demand that any defendant in any circumstances be given only five months to thoroughly prepare a rebuttal or explanation of that volume of evidence.
We would not in Australia, or in just about any other democracy, tolerate such a course of conduct on the part of prosecutors and courts, so why the silence on the part of those nations who are funding the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia about its repressive request of Karadzic?
Karadzic’s arguments to the court about the matter of time to prepare have been perfectly reasonable. When presiding judge O-Gon Kwon warned him recently that if he does not attend court hearings the court will appoint a defence counsel for him, Karadzic replied: “I don’t need other people, I just need time. It would be cheapest and easiest, with fewest problems, to give me more time to prepare.”
So far, judge O-Gon Kwon is immovable and the chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz says that Karadzic has had ample time to prepare his defence — 14 years to be exact. This statement should be taken with more than a grain of salt because prosecutors, with the vast armory of the taxpayer-funded lawyers and investigators behind them, forget that they are Goliath and the defendant is more often than not David. And let’s not forget that the charges and final brief against Karadzic were only assembled and served on him this year.
Christoph Safferling, the director of the research and documentation centre at the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, told Deutsche Welle on October 26 that it is “absolutely essential that there is a proper trial against Karadzic”.
He is right, particularly given that if found guilty on any one or more of the charges against him, Karadzic will face the rest of his life behind bars. At the moment Karadzic is being railroaded by a process that looks less like a fair trial than a manipulated procedure obsessed with a rapid conviction.
Give him a fair trial, but make sure you’ve got the rope handy.
Greg, your article smacks of a naivete I know you can’t possibly possess. And the bias only a defence lawyer can bring.
The ICC has long been recognised as more of a political process than anything resembling a criminal justice system. The court is presided over by a bench of judges from incredibly diverse legal systems, rules of evidence are often made up as they go simply because of the necessity to do so, and the briefs of evidence routinely involve the millions of pages you whinge about in Karadzic’s trial. That’s what happens when you are accused of killing thousands of people. Imagine what a trial of that scale would look like in Australia, given the boxes of evidence produced when there is just one victim.
I also wonder what you meant by your crack at “prosecutors”. As a former prosecutor, I laughed out loud at your assertion that “prosecutors, with the vast armory of the taxpayer-funded lawyers and investigators behind them, forget they are the Goliath…”. Prosecutors in what alternative universe? The ICC prosecutors usually have one or two lead investigators for each case, with a team of 3 or 4 investigators, all provided by law enforcement agencies from participating countries. This tiny team (a homicide investigation in Australia – for ONE victim – would involve an initial investigating team of ten or more, plus physical evidence analysts) is responsible for obtaining thousands of statements, pieces of physical evidence, coroner’s reports, footage, expert statements….and often from people scattered across the world and working in different jurisdictions.
I say all this because really, your defence of Karadzic’s antics is way off the mark. His trial is not a trial the way you think it should be, and the prosecution are not this all-powerful legal firm with unlimited funds and manpower as you assert. I would wager Karadzic has more lawyers on his team than there are prosecutors at the ICC.
As Serge Brammertz said, Karadzic knows what his defence is, if he has one, and it’s not buried in the minute details of that brief.
As usual, both sides are too extreme here. On the one hand, it’s clearly unreasonable to expect Karadzic – or any defendant – to process such a staggering volume of evidence no matter how many legal advisers they have. On the other, Karadzic’s behaviour thus far suggests less a desire for procedural fairness and more a desire to grandstand, delay, and generally attention-seek. His repetitive – and utterly hopeless – attempts to use the alleged Holbrooke immunity to avoid prosecution, his insistence on self-representation when he could have superb counsel defending him and his constant attempts to deny the legitimacy of the court suggest that he is not engaging in the process in good faith. Which is hardly surprising, given the evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
Usually I’m a very strong advocate for the rights of defendants but in this case I’m skeptical. Marko Milanovic has an interesting take on Karadzic’s true motivations – and the potential consequences if the court doesn’t curb his behaviour – over at the European Journal of International Law blog: http://www.ejiltalk.org/the-aborted-start-of-the-karadzic-trial/#more-1684
Give him the same justice he gave the Bosnian men and boys in the camp,please the man deserves everything he will get,pity they don’t have a firing squad
You may well be right about getting a fair trial given the 1.3 million pages of documentation, it sounds like you would need 20 years to study a mass of paper like that.
If he is as guilty as everyone presumes, surely there is at least one serious charge that is pretty well cut and dried; try him on that count and forget the others, at least for the time being.
What we appear to have is a treasure trove for lawyers.