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The U.S. government should press Serbia for additional human rights improvements before it decides to certify Belgrade for continued U.S. aid, Human Rights Watch said today.

In testimony delivered today before the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the executive director of the Human Rights Watch Europe and Central Asia Division, Elizabeth Andersen, said that the Serbian government should demonstrate stronger commitment to the rule of law, including a genuine commitment to establishing accountability for war crimes.

Since 2000, the U.S. Congress has been adopting an annual list of reforms required of Serbia to avoid a cut-off of U.S. economic assistance. Humanitarian and democracy aid is exempted from the conditionality. Human Rights Watch said that Section 578 of the U.S. Foreign Operations Appropriations Act has been singularly effective, because it specifically identifies required reform, sets a deadline, and backs it up with clear consequences for inaction. The law identifies cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the rule of law, and respect for minority rights, as priority areas for progress.

“In the past year, the Serbian government has made some progress on cooperation with the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal and accountability for war-time atrocities,” said Andersen. “But it still lacks clear political leadership to ensure that all those responsible for war crimes are held accountable.”

Human Rights Watch listed the following benchmarks of progress and urged the U.S. government to consider the extent to which they have been satisfied in connection with any decision on certification:

  • Arrest of former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and commitments to apprehend all indictees remaining in the territory of Serbia and Montenegro within one year.
  • Confirmation from the Prosecutor of the ICTY that she is receiving full cooperation with ICTY document requests.
  • Adoption of the draft law on war crime trials and a commitment to urgently adopt a comprehensive and effective witness protection law.
  • Issuance of indictments or other concrete and verifiable evidence of progress on domestic investigations into prominent alleged war crimes, including Batajnica (mass graves in Belgrade’s suburbs, containing some 500 bodies of Kosovo Albanians killed in 1999).
  • Urgent changes in the law on organized crime to prohibit incommunicado detention and otherwise bring the law in compliance with Council of Europe standards.
  • Ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture.

A complete copy of the Human Rights Watch testimony assessing compliance with the certification criteria is available at: https://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/serbiatestimony060403.htm.

For a transcript of the entire briefing, please refer to the CSCE website at: http://www.csce.gov/briefings.cfm?briefing_id=255.

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