Given that the genocide in Srebrenica has been established by court judgments, it means that any criticism of those judgments is prohibited and permanently so. This returns the global legal order to the Middle Ages or at least to conditions under which criticisms of judgments were banned in the most reactionary regimes, emphasized Slobodan Stojanović, a lawyer from Belgrade and defender of Serbian defendants in The Hague.
“However, the foundations of civilizational achievements in the field of human rights do not allow the abolition of every possibility of critical thinking when it comes to ‘sacred’ judgments. But, here is something much worse. It is about banning the statement of revision as an extraordinary legal remedy established by the act of the UN Security Council. And even worse, it is about banning judges from deciding according to their beliefs, i.e., to judge. Namely, by Article 26 of the Statute of the Hague Tribunal, or Article 24 of the Statute of its Residual Mechanism, it is established the unlimited right of every convicted person, including those for genocide in Srebrenica, to initiate a revision procedure with the basic thesis that there was no genocide there,” Stojanović emphasized.
Stojanović emphasizes that defense teams cannot be prohibited from publicly gathering evidence for revision.
“Even worse, competent judicial council cannot be prohibited from deciding according to their beliefs. Let us remember Judge Nyambe from Zambia who, as the presiding judge of the Appeals Chamber of the Tribunal in the case of Ratko Mladić, decided that there was no genocide in Srebrenica and gave a separate opinion which leads to an acquittal,” Stojanović pointed out.
He states that these are rights based on acts of the UN Security Council, which were also the basis for judgments on genocide and which are unreservedly respected in all circumstances around the world.
“The majority of countries in the world have already committed themselves to respecting the same in national laws,” Stojanović concluded.
Source: RTRS
