(THE HAGUE) - Human Rights Watch has sent a letter to the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs commending him on the Dutch move refusing to sign a pact with Serbia unless there was full cooperation with the UN war crimes court, the letter obtained Wednesday by AFP showed.

In the letter addressed to minister Maxime Verhagen and dated February 12 the rights watchdog says it commends "your government's principled stand in refusing to sign the Stabilisation Association Agreement (SAA) with Serbia in the absence of its full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)".

"Maintaining a principled stance on cooperation with the Yugoslav tribunal offers the victims of the remaining fugitives -- including those of the Srebrenica massacre -- the chance to finally see justice for the atrocities that they have endured," it added.

In January most of the EU foreign ministers were pushing to sign the SAA, the first step for Balkans nations to join the EU, ahead of a critical election in Serbia.

The Dutch refused because they insisted that full cooperation with the UN court was a condition of signing such a deal.

The Dutch insist the Serbs must help bring former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic -- indicted for genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre -- to the ICTY.

Mladic is indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide over the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town. Dutch UN peacekeepers were accused of standing by and letting the slaughter happen.

After the Dutch veto Serbia was offered a watered down cooperation deal with the EU but Belgrade has meanwhile become embroiled in a political power struggle over the deal.

While Serbia's newly-elected President Boris Tadic is in favour of rapprochement with the EU, nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica is against it. Kostunica sees the EU deal as a sweetener for a mission paving the way for the independence of Serbia's Albanian-majority southern province of Kosovo.

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