PROSECUTING
GENOCIDE
AND WAR CRIMES
There are no small criminal cases. This is one of the first lessons I learned as a deputy prosecuting attorney at the King County Prosecuting Attor- ney’s Office. Each case — felony or misdemeanor —
involves victims and witnesses touched by crime and a defendant facing loss of liberty. When I moved from Seattle to the
Netherlands to prosecute war crimes for the United Nations,
however, I learned just how massive criminal cases could be,
and why international criminal tribunals are more important
now than ever.
For 10 years, I worked for the Office of the Prosecutor of
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), prosecuting some of the most complex criminal cases ever indicted. I went from trying felonies at the Regional
Justice Center in Kent to litigating years-long cases of
genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity before
panels of international judges in The Hague, Netherlands.
It’s difficult to overstate the magnitude and difficulty of the
cases we tried there.
Rough Roads and Hostile Witnesses
For my first assignment at the ICTY, I spent 11 months investi-
gating the murders of 21 men who had disappeared into ad hoc
Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina prison camps. We were try-
ing to prove a series of 12-year-old murders for which we had
no forensic or eyewitness evidence, and that were committed
more than 800 miles away in a still-fractured country whose
former general we had charged with war crimes. Gathering
evidence meant relying on the cooperation of a government
opposed to the most important aspect of our case: proving that
the foreign mujahedin soldiers who came to Bosnia during
the war had joined its armed forces. Interviewing witnesses
in person meant persuading our bosses in The Hague that the
information we expected to get was valuable; booking travel
to Bosnia; arranging for an interpreter (preferably of the same
by Kyle Wood
Trying Massive
International Criminal
Cases for the
United Nations
ethnic group as the witness); flying to Sarajevo; and driving
Toyota 4Runners through the mountainous Bosnian country-
side to villages so small they had no street names or house
numbers. Then, within minutes of arriving, we were asking
sometimes-hostile or traumatized people we’d just met to tell
us about events they’d often spent years trying to forget.
I spent the following year litigating that case — the first of
11 trials I worked on at the ICTY. It was the nearest thing to a
small case as any trial at the tribunal, where the average trial
from opening statements to final judgment lasted two years
and four months. Eight ICTY trials spanned more than three
years from start to finish. The longest trial lasted eight years,
four months, and 24 days.
A “Short” Trial: 11 Months, 77 Witnesses, 1,346 Exhibits
Our case was based on a four-count indictment charging murder, rape, and cruel treatment involving more than 100 victims over a period of two-and-a-half years. We called 64 live
witnesses and offered 689 exhibits. The defense called 13 witnesses and offered 657 exhibits. Many of our witnesses came
from those same small villages we had visited during our pre-trial missions to Bosnia. Some had never left their municipal-ities, much less their country, so logistics had to be arranged:
passports, security, chaperons. For some of them, a trip to The
Hague was as incomprehensible as a trip to the moon. One
man told us, quite reasonably, that he couldn’t come to testify
because it was lambing season and he had to be there in case
anything went wrong. Others just did their best to ignore the
summons delivered to their doors by the police, but were ultimately persuaded to attend without the trial chamber having
to invoke its power to hold them in contempt for refusing to
appear.
Once our witnesses did arrive, they were called to testify
in spaces that looked more like television studios than court-
rooms. All ICTY proceedings are broadcast more or less live — A l
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