Update! NATO - International Law

Kia ora,

The International Court of Justice will announce its decisions in the cases before it on the Legality of the use of Force against Yugoslavia by Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Britain and the USA at 10am, on Wednesday 2 June - 9PM on Wednesday, our time.

As we will all be away for the National Peace Workshops, if you are interested in the decisions, please check out the mass media's coverage of it, or the ICJ's website: http://www.icj-cij.org

The decisions are awaited with interest, especially given the timing of the indictments against Milosevic and others which were issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) last week.

Also awaited with interest is news of progress of the Notice of Information which was laid with the the ICTY on 6 May by a group of international lawyers, charging Clinton, Blair, Chretian and other NATO heads of government with war crimes relating to the NATO bombing.

" Louise Arbour, the Canadian judge who has been the ICTY's chief prosecutor since 1996, has publicly stated that by launching military operations in Yugoslavia, the NATO countries have ``voluntarily submitted themselves to the jurisdiction'' of the tribunal. She told a public gathering in The Hague on Thursday that she accepted NATO's assurances that its military operations were ``in full compliance with international humanitarian law.''

However, she refused to comment on how NATO's bombing record measures up to those assurances. Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor, told The Times of India that Prof Mandel's complaint had been received but refused to say whether the matter was being investigated or not. ``The ICTY does not comment publicly on which cases it is investigating,'' he said.

When asked by this correspondent why Ms Arbour had publicly stated that she was investigating the crimes allegedly committed by Yugoslav forces, Mr Blewitt said that was ``an exception'' in order to ``deter the Serbs.'' NATO, he felt, did not need a similar warning. ``So far, I have not seen any evidence to suggest NATO is committing war crimes...History will be the final judge.'' However, he did concede that the judgment of history would be of little value to those civilians who are being killed by NATO bombs today. " (Times of India article, 15 May 1999.)

Return to PMA's Alert: Stop NATO bombing, Condemn NZ government support for the airstrikes!

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