'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Slobo: 'fit' to be tried, contd...

Ana Uzelac of the Inst. for War & Peace Reporting had a good piece in their 9 July collection of stories about Slobo's trial in The Hague. She was exploring the whole issue of him being declared "fit" or "unfit" to stand trial, and what the court's options are.

It turns out that, contrary to what I wrote here last week, Slobo was not declared (globally) "unfit to stand trial", which is sort of a different proceeding. What Judge Patrick Robinson did July 5 was merely postpone the trial, pending the defendant gaining the strength needed to proceed with his own defense... And that was done again, July 12.

If he is declared more generally "unfit" to stand trial, then the court has various options. According to Uzelac, what the judges ruled last week was that:

there was 'no evidence that the accused is not fit to stand trial at all', adding that that it might be time to force him to accept counsel.

'The health of the accused is such that he may not be fit to continue to represent himself,' they said. 'His continuing to represent himself could adversely affect the fair and expeditious conduct of the trial'.

It was the strongest signal yet that the judges may withdraw Milosevic's right to present his case in person, which he has insisted on since the start.

Basically, there are three separate issues here. One is whether Slobo is fit on any given day both to stand trial and also--as is his oft-stated desire--to conduct his own defense. A second is whether he is more globally "fit" to be tried, in the legal sense (with or without being represented by a lawyer). A third is whether the court can impose legal representation on him, even though he is himself a qualified lawyer.

Uzelac noted that:

Even in the earlier prosecution phase, Milosevic's poor health dogged the trial's progress. The medical report read out in the court on Monday July 5 suggested not only that he was ill but that his illness would reoccur whenever he faced pressure.

The judges admitted this meant they would have to 'navigate' between the stress that the proceedings have exerted on Milosevic's blood pressure, and the contradictory need to expedite a trial that has already slowed to three days a week.

The court's dilemma is that while the defendant's tendency to turn the proceedings into a political rally has endangered the trial's efficiency, curbing his right to represent himself may undermine faith in its fairness both within Serbia and outside it...

But the option of imposing a lawyer on Milosevic to expedite the case may prove difficult, as he might well refuse to communicate with the lawyer or even take part in the trial at all.

And later, that:

The procedure for imposing a lawyer is anticipated in the tribunal's basic legal documents, and there are precedents.

The indicted leader of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Seselj, has been assigned a counsel against his will. And Vidoje Blagojevic, a Bosnian Serb accused over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, is represented by a counsel he does not recognise-- in his case, the two fell out already when the trial was under way.

But both Blagojevic and Seselj cases are less high-profile than that of Milosevic, whose refusal to cooperate would have much greater public impact.

The BBC's website has noted meanwhile that, though Slobo is a longtime smoker and afficianado of fine cigars, the court has no power to force him to stop smoking, since he is still, until he is convicted, presumed to be innocent.

Tangled webs, eh?