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Milosevic's Lawsuit Rejected by Dutch Court
A lawsuit by former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was rejected Friday by a local court in The Hague, reports reaching Brussels said.
The lawsuit was lodged by lawyers who are volunteering their services for Milosevic to challenge the legality of the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The lawyers hoped that Milosevic could be released from a U.N. detention center in The Hague, political center of the Netherlands.
The local court ruled that the war crimes tribunal is "an independent and impartial court." The decision by district court judge Roel Paris cited earlier rulings on the tribunal's legitimacy by the European Court of Human Rights last year and by the tribunal's own appellate court after one of its first convictions six years ago.
"The Dutch court is incompetent to rule" on Milosevic's demand for release, the judge said. It was up to the ICTY to decide whether the former president's arguments were justified.
"The tribunal can be considered to be an independent and impartial court," said the ruling, issued after a week of deliberation over arguments presented in his courtroom by Milosevic's legal team and lawyers for the Dutch state.
Milosevic had asked the district court to rule that the ICTY had no jurisdiction on Dutch territory because it had been illegally established by the U.N. Security Council, rather than by the General Assembly.
Government lawyers countered that Milosevic had recognized the tribunal when he signed the 1995 Dayton peace accords ending four years of wars in the Balkans -- an act Milosevic now claims was done under duress.
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