Last word?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Last word?

On May 30th the tribunal in The Hague acquitted the former head of Serbia’s secret police and his right-hand man. The judgment offered great detail about the various militias they had formed, trained and financed and the crimes these had committed, but argued that there was no evidence that the accused had ordered these crimes. A day earlier six Bosnian Croats were convicted. Direct links between them and their crimes had been established.

Eric Gordy of London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies says that the standards for convictions have changed in the last few months compared with earlier judgments. It is no longer enough “to have provided the resources to have committed a crime…you needed specific knowledge of it”. According to a court insider, some people already jailed would not have been convicted under the court’s new doctrine. He added that the latest judgments will have consequences for the future of international justice because they have weakened the criteria for holding political leaders accountable, especially if the crimes were committed abroad.

The tribunal did not convict a single person who was an official of the Serbian or Croatian governments for a crime committed in Bosnia. Only four members of the Yugoslav armed forces were convicted of atrocities perpetrated in Croatia and no Croats for crimes committed against Serbs in Croatia. So the judicial record does not match the historical record, according to Mr Gordy.