NLA WAR CRIMES MAY BE TRIED IN STOCKHOLM
admin1 – April 25, 2013 – 1:24pm

The Hague, Stockholm or Skopje are the three destinations that legal experts point out as venues where a court epilogue may be sought to the four war crime cases of 2001 (NLA Leadership, Mavrovo Construction Workers, Lipkovo Dam and Neprosteno Mass Grave) despite what is known as the authentic interpretation of the amnesty law, which terminated their processing in the Macedonian judicial system, Dnevnik reports.

Both home and foreign experts say that the amnesty is invalid considering war crime cases can never become time-barred nor can they be amnestied.

The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) sent a letter to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague five days ago, requesting of the court to take back the cases it returned in 2006 considering the Macedonian judicial system, in their view, lacks capacity and considering these cases need a legal rather than a political closure. On the other hand, Jordan Apostolski, a lawyer accredited in both the ICTY and the International Court of Justice, argues that what are known as the Hague cases may be processed in Stockholm considering that under the Swedish law Swedish courts may process such cases regardless of who committed the war crimes and where.