HAGUE TRIBUNAL
The Hague Tribunal was an ARBITRATION court established for the purpose of facilitating immediate recourse for the settlement of international disputes. As of 1993, the term is often used to refer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which has prosecutorial and adjudicatory powers. Both entities
are commonly referred to transitionally as the Hague Tribunal, although technically speaking, they are not the same.
The Hague Tribunal was established by the
Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to provide a
permanent court accessible at all times for the
resolution of international differences. The
court was granted jurisdiction over all arbitra-
tion cases, provided the parties thereto did not
decide to institute a special tribunal. In addition,
an international bureau was established to act as
a registry for the tribunal and to serve as the
channel of communications with respect to the
meetings of the court.
The Hague Tribunal is considered perma-
nent due to the fact that there is a permanent list
1of members from among whom the arbitrators
are chosen. In 1907 at the Second Hague Confer-
ence it was provided that of the two arbitrators
selected by each of the parties, only one could be
a national of the state appointing him or her.
In 1993, the UNITED NATIONS (UN) Security
Council passed a resolution to establish within
the Hague, Netherlands, an ad hoc international
14-judge court expressly mandated to prosecute
and adjudicate WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE, and
crimes against humanity committed on the ter-
ritory of the former Yugoslavia. This Interna-
tional Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) is often referred to as the
Hague Tribunal. (Subsequent resolutions have
increased the court to 16 members as well as a
special force of ad litem judges.) The tribunal is
composed of three chambers and an appeal
chamber. Judges are elected by the UN Assembly
but are nominated for four-year terms by their
respective countries.
The UN Security Council also chooses a
prosecutor who, in the name of the tribunal,
brings indictments. The tribunal has power to
impose prison sentences up to life but has no
power to impose the death penalty. Sentences
meted by the tribunal are served in various
prison systems of several nations with whom the
tribunal has made formal arrangements. The tri-
bunal has no policing power or police force and
relies for these on the mandated cooperation of
various states for arrests, documents, and com-
pulsory producing of witnesses. It operates on an
annual budget of approximately $100 million.
In its first ten years (1993–2003), the tribunal
had indicted over 80 defendants (several in cus-
tody awaiting trial) and completed 34 trials, for
which 29 persons were found guilty. (Of the 29
convictions, 18 were Serbs; nine were Croats; and
two were Bosnian Muslims.) One of the more
notorious defendants, former Yugoslav president
Slobodan Milosevic, faced 66 separate charges of
grave crimes, including genocide and other atroc-
ities allegedly involving Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia,
Serbia, and Kosovo.His trial had been continuing
for more than a year as of March 2003. Other
completed trials included that of General
Radislav Krystic, found guilty of genocide in the
Srebrenica massacres of as many as 8,000 persons;
Croatian General Tihomir Blaskic, found guilty
of the massacre of villagers in Ahmici; and Gen-
eral Stanislav Galic, allegedly involved in the
killing of civilians in Sarajevo. As of April 2003,
two of the most wanted defendants remained at
large: President Radovan Karadzic of the Bosnian
Serb Republic, and Ratko Mladic, former com-
