In a letter leaked to a Danish newspaper, a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has accused the court’s president of pressuring other judges and ruling against years of the court’s own precedent. Judge Frederik Harhoff’s letter (published in English here) has reinforced what observers of the court have noted concerning a number of recent acquittals handed down by the ICTY: that the court’s long-standing precedent of holding commanding officers responsible for the war crimes of their subordinates seemed to have been set aside.
Judge Harhoff’s letter accuses ICTY president Theodor Meron, an American citizen who has worked for both the US State Department and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, of pressuring other judges on the court, and hypothesizes that Mr. Meron could himself have been pressured by either US or Israeli officials to change the court’s stance on the culpability of command officers.
