Institute of Democracy and Cooperation

The Milosevic Trial

Publication day: 15/4/2009

John Laughland's book, "Travesty: the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice" , originally published by Pluto Press in London, has been published in Russian translation with the help of the Foundation for Historical Outlook in Moscow.

The book argues that the present trend towards international criminal law is flawed and unwelcome. John Laughland starts by discussing the circumstances under which the serving president of Yugoslavia was indicted - at the height of NATO's attack against that country. That attack was itself indisputably illegal under international law, since it was not in self-defence and it had not been authorised by the UN Security Council. On the contrary, as the leaders of the belligerent states (especially the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair) said at the time, the very purpose of the war was to change the international system by discarding sovereignty as the basis of it and introducing a new regime in which states had the right to interfere in each other's internal affairs.

John Laughland is strongly opposed to this development. He also points out that it is incompatible with international law such as it was conceived at the Nuremberg Trials and in the contemporaneous UN charter. The trials are the charter are based on the doctrine of non-interference: the Nuremberg judges made aggressive war a crime, while the judges at the International Court of Justice (the supreme judicial organ of the United Nations) have repeatedly ruled against universal jurisdiction and the right of interference.

The author therefore argues that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (like the other ad hoc tribunal created for Rwanda) is illegitimate. The UN Security Council is an executive organ which has as little right to prosecute criminals as it has to raise taxes. The invocation of the Security Council's Chapter 7 powers on peacekeeping as the pretext for the creation of this tribunal pressuposes that peace can exist only when the same universal human rights are respected (and enforced) everywhere. In fact, history shows (and, more importantly, international la says) that military violence cannot be used to correct human rights abuses. Human rights have just as often been a factor behind war as a factor for peace.

Laughland in any case takes issue with the claims made about Kosovo at the time of the NATO war and the indictment of Milosevic. He claims that what was happening in Kosovo was not ethnic cleansing, still less genocide which in fact the ICTY never even alleged although plenty of NATO leaders had during the bombing. Instead, it was a situation similar to those which had arisen all over Central America in the 1980s, when the United States sponsored or created guerrilla movements in order to overthrow leftist governments. The most famous example of this is ther Contras who fought against the Sandanista regime in Nicaragua. The Kosovo Liberation Army was simply Balkan version of the Contras, created and supported in order to overthrow Milosevic.

Laughland gives a strong critique of the procedures and rules of the Tribunal. He argues that its rules are stacked heavily against the defence and that its theories of criminal laibility are unstable and dangerous. He also claims that the Milseovic prosecution was based on an improbably conspiracy theory which in fact collapsed three years into the trial. He also points out that much of the testimony offered by the Prosecution was in fact massively exculpatory of the defendant, even though the world's media did not report these findings.

The ICTY violated its own Charter when it decided to impose a defence lawyer on Slobodan Milosevic. The attempt eventually failed because the Defence witnesses boycotted the trial but the principle was thereby established that a sick man's trial can be allowed to continue in an international tribunal, in his absence, whereas in most jurisdictions trials are abandoned if the defendant is too ill to take part himself.