“The impunity for gruesome crimes committed against the Serbian population has essentially become a policy which has found a strong foothold precisely in the work of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” estimated the Minister of Justice of Serbia Maja Popović at yesterday’s Security Council session.

According to media reports, the representative of Russia presented similar claims at the same session, saying that the inaction of the ICTY has led to Priština “believing that it is blameless”, while the representative of Albania, on the other hand, denied the allegations about the involvement of Albania and Albanians in war crimes.

In her address on the issue of the six-month report on the work of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, Popović assessed that Serbia leads a responsible policy of reconciliation in the region, without which there will be no future, stability, economic development, or normalization of the relations.

In her address, according to the Ministry of Justice of Serbia, she pointed to some of the key issues concerning the current cooperation between Serbia and the Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

Popović said that the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia “has completely failed” in the investigations and trials for crimes perpetrated against Serbian and non-Albanian civilians on the territory of Kosovo and Metohija.

“With that failure, it has significantly damaged the reputation and trust in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Mechanism. The impunity for gruesome crimes committed against the Serbian population has essentially become a policy which has found a strong foothold precisely in the work of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” concluded Popović.

She stressed that all references relating to Kosovo must be understood in the full accordance with the Security Council Resolution No. 1244.

“It is the obligation of all participants in the prosecution of war crimes and cooperation in the fight against crime to fully act in accordance with this resolution,” said Popović.

Without further specification, the Ministry of Justice of Serbia said that Popović also pointed out that ten requests for legal aid which the Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes of Serbia sent to the EULEX in Priština are yet to be answered.

She also pointed out that there has been no progress regarding the return of extensive archives that the Republic of Serbia forwarded to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or the Mechanism, and which, according to the Ministry, has not been used or is no longer needed for the current trials before the Mechanism.

“There is no reason to further delay starting the process of returning the original documentation,” she emphasized.

The Minister of Justice stressed that in the period covered by the report, the Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes of the Republic of Serbia actively cooperated with the Mechanism’s Office of the Prosecutor.

In addition to regular meetings at a high level, she said, there was cooperation in specific cases against two high-ranking officials, which resulted in one indictment and a progress in the investigation in a different case.

In this period, as she said, a task force was formed consisting of the representatives of the Mechanism and the Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes of the Republic of Serbia in order to advance the cooperation in specific cases, especially in the matter of securing evidence.