FUTURA UBICACIÓN DE LOS ARCHIVOS DE LA HAYA SIGUE SIENDO INCIERTO

Future Location of the Hague Archives Remains Uncertain

EN: BALKANINSGHT.COM

SITE: http://www.balkaninsight.com

FECHA: 19/05/2010

AUTOR: Laura Boerhout

Although the Tribunal is scheduled to close in February 2014 important decisions about its gigantic archive have yet to be made and views differ sharply on its future location.

After years of combating a culture of impunity about war crimes, the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, is moving to an end, leaving behind millions of documents.

Trials of 161 indicted persons have left the Tribunal with an extensive archive consisting of more than 5,500 witness testimonies and other evidence.

“The volume of records is absolutely huge and is spread over four buildings and many, many servers. It contains a huge quantity of documents,” Elizabeth Emmerson, archivist at the ICTY, explained during a conference organised by the ICTY in the Hague in February on the legacy of the Tribunal.

As well as containing day-to-day administrative papers, the archive contains highly valuable documents that could support future trials and promote reconciliation in the region, experts say.
As the first president of the ICTY, Antonio Cassese, put it already in 2004 in a article: “The Tribunal has established a record of events that will go down in history and may not be impugned in the future.”

The importance of permanently preserving the archive is something that all parties agree on. Professor Aptel, Senior Fellow at the International Center for Transitional Justice, Headquarters New York stated that the ICTY archives are of “tremendous value for the continuation of the fight against impunity…and also for building a shared understanding among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia.”

At a conference that the ICTY organised on the legacy of the Tribunal, several stakeholders gave their view on the value and future location of the archives.

Mirsad Tokaca, director of the Research and Documentation Center in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the archive was “a lasting memorial, reminding us of the tragedies of the war”, adding: “We’re talking about our collective memory here and all of us should have access to that.”

Although the archive is widely acknowledged as part of the joint heritage of the region, a final decision concerning the archives and their location remains in the hands of the UN Security Council, since it is legally UN property.

In May 2009, the UN Secretary General published a report on the future of the archives, supported by an informal Working group on International Tribunals and the Advisory Committee on the Archives of the UN Tribunals (ACA).

One recommendation was the establishment of a residual mechanism to execute certain functions of the Tribunal after its closure, so as to make sure that the two remaining indictees, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, could still be tried.

One of the main conclusions that the Secretary General reached was that “the Tribunal’s archives would most effectively and efficiently be co-located with, and co-managed by, the residual mechanism”.

Konrad Bühler, a legal advisor to the Working Group, acknowledged that the issue of the archive’s location “is a sensitive issue and highly emotional at times… but in order to conduct a trial against Mladic you need direct access to the original documents and therefore in the short term it [the archive] should be co-located with the residual mechanism.”

Bosnian officials have meanwhile explicitly stated that they want the archives relocated to their country. The mayor of Sarajevo, Semiha Borovac urged the location of the archives in the Bosnian capital in a letter to the Secretary-General in 2008.

This was supported by Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association  of Camp Inmates in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He said at a conference in The Hague: “We need to take our future into our own hands, so our posterity would be able to investigate the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Hatidza Mehmedovic, President of the Mothers of Srebrenica association, agreed. “The archives should be located where the genocide took place,” she said

Mirsad Tokaca expressed concern that several different, contradictory collective memories of the war were present in the region, and this syndrome was reinforced by “lack of adequate documentation”. According to him, the problem could be partially addressed by locating the archives in the region.

According to the report of the UN Secretary- General, both Serbia and Croatia oppose taking the archives to Bosnia, preferring a location outside the region “because they believe that there are reasonable doubts as to whether access to the archives would be equal for the populations of all the affected countries.”

Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Serbia, shared this concern. “The key question is who will ensure that there is control over this sensitive material,” she said at the Hague conference. “There has to be independent oversight over this confidential material… and that there’s no possibility of them being abused.”
Kandic said she was concerned about issuing any one stakeholder being issued “a blank cheque of confidence, including all this investigative material”.

Croatian representatives attending the conference in The Hague expressed similar concerns. One said he strongly opposed the transfer of the archive to the region, “because peace does not reign [there, and] we never know who may set out to destroy this archive.”

As several states in the region have expressed their doubts about locating the archive in former Yugoslavia, the Secretary General has concluded that none of the affected countries can provide a desirable location.

The Secretary General has identified that the archive should not be too far from the region, but in order to provide adequate protection and security it should preferably be located on UN premises.

Throughout the conference, it was stressed that short-term decisions concerning the archives do not preclude a later decision to transfer the archive to the region. “When the security concern is solved it’s obvious the archive should be in the region,” Professor Steinberg of the University of California in Los Angeles School of Law, said.
Another option, to split up the archives between different countries, was not considered desirable, since it would violate the archive’s integrity. The archival principle entails that the body of records may not be dissolved… but [must] be preserved as a complete entity,” Professor Ketelaar, specialist in Archival Science at the University of Amsterdam, explained.

However, this does not preclude making copies of the archive available for different stakeholders. The Advisory Committee on the Archives of the UN Tribunals suggested the creation of “archives branches” and several information and documentation centres showed their interest in these copies.

The existence of the Internet has made granting accessibility to the archive easier to contemplate. Most of the trial material is in digital format, though the documents are not yet made available or easily searchable; a concern that was frequently touched on at the conference.

Another obstacle that still has to be overcome is the translation of the transcripts into the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian language, since all documents are published in the working languages of the UN; English and French.

The current president of the ICTY, Judge Patrick Robinson, called it “very regrettable and unfortunate that transcripts of our proceedings are not in the national languages of the countries concerned”, adding that the Tribunal is now “seeking to set that right.”

The director of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, agreed. This was an example of how the ICTY had “failed yet to bridge the gap between you and the countries in the region.”