Croatia says UN court blocks its EU path
Ivo Josipovic - Photo EU Council
(ZAGREB) - Croatian President Ivo Josipovic said Thursday that the UN war crimes court was blocking the final phase of his country's EU path over Zagreb's past mistakes.
"Croatia is slowly becoming a hostage of its relations with The Hague(-based) tribunal since we see that (cooperation with the court) is one of the criteria" to conclude talks to join the European Union, Josipovic said.
He spoke at an international conference on the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) held in the Croatian capital, national radio reported.
Croatia has already closed 28 of the 35 so-called policy chapters that every nation must negotiate with the EU before becoming a member.
Full cooperation with the ICTY is a criteria for the key chapter on the judiciary, which remains to be closed.
Josipovic, a law professor, estimated that the issue was more political than legal at this point.
"What bothers me as a jurist is that the The Hague court in its statute has (defined) ... a very clear legal way on how to establish if a country is not cooperating" with it, Josipovic said.
"However, Croatia's progress towards EU is still depending on a relatively subjective opinion of the prosecutor" on whether Croatia truly handed over all documents requested by the ICTY, he added.
Josipovic was referring notably to documents related to the use of artillery by Croat forces at the end of the 1991-1995 war that the UN court had been requesting from Zagreb for the trial of three former Croatian generals.
"Today no one is hiding... (those) or any other documents," Josipovic said.
"A mistake was made some 10 years ago and very probably today we cannot fix that," he stressed.
Croatia initially denied having any such papers in its possession, but now claims it provided to the UN court all of the wartime documents it had found and there are no more.
Croatia's proclamation of independence from the former Yugoslavia sparked the war with Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs who opposed the move.