The EU accession and transitional criminal justice in Serbia and Croatia
Date
2014
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikooli Euroopa kolledž
Abstract
The international mechanisms to pursue the legal accountability of the past atrocities
evolved from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials to the permanent International Criminal
Court (ICC). As a result of such development, the post-Cold War international
tribunals appear to hold particular characteristics; they impose a legal obligation for
states under their jurisdiction to cooperate and they are dependant on such state
cooperation to fulfil its legal mandate. To secure such cooperation, third party
coercion appears to be effective as a determining factor of the state’s behaviour in the
face of legal obligation. In this scope, former Yugoslavian states offer a significant
example. In 1993, the United Nations (UN) established the International Criminal
Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as an international court to prosecute those
who were most responsible for the massive human rights violations committed during
the bloody Balkan Wars in the1990s. In the due course of its operation, the political
pressure from third party actors, most notably the EU, played a vital role to yield a
significant outcome of the tribunal’s mandate.
This study is to address such impact of the EU accession conditionality on the politics
of Transitional Criminal Justice in post-conflict Croatia and Serbia. For this purpose,
the author conducted the comparative analysis of those two cases with a scope of the
Most Similar System Design (MSSD). She combined several qualitative methods,
such as content analysis, secondary analysis and interviews with experts, to trace the
evidence showing the changes that occurred before and after the EU’s imposing its
political pressure. The outcome of this study showed that the EU accession
conditionality could facilitate positive and stable development in the overall
cooperation with the tribunal, while such external pressure had a counterproductive
effect at the level of domestic war crime prosecution. Therefore, the findings of this
study contain a warning that partial involvement of a third party in the area of
Transitional Justice could result in an undesirable outcome.