Negative report on Serbia-Hague cooperation

Chief UN war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz says that Serbia’s efforts to arrest war crimes indictee Ratko Mladic are insufficient.

The report Brammertz submitted to the UN Security Council on Belgrade’s cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal, writes that Serbia’s existing strategy for the arrest of the two remaining fugitives has proven entirely unsuccessful. 

“Serbia needs to reconsider all steps that have been taken so far, to reconsider its strategy and the method it is applying in the strategy and to immediately fix all flaws. A new, significantly more rigorous approach in the search for the fugitives is urgently needed,” the report said.

The chief prosecutor stressed that the criticism included in his December report had only partially been taken into account and that the authorities were still following only a limited number of leads in their search for the Hague fugitives and were unable to expand the investigation.