Serbia's legal team: No retroactive liability

THE HAGUE - Serbia's legal representatives underlined on Tuesday before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague that Serbia cannot be accountable for the crimes committed in Croatia before the constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ) on April 27, 1992.

They noted that Croatia's lawsuit against Serbia for genocide, which was allegedly committed against Croats in the conflict in 1991 in this former republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ), is practically a call for retroactive implementation of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Before the declaration of the new state, Serbia was not a signatory of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and therefore the Convention cannot be applied to the crimes committed during the war in Croatia in 1991, believe Serbia's representatives German Professors Christian Tams and Andreas Zimmermann.

Tams said that the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was not made to be implemented retroactively to regulate the past, including the WWII Holocaust, but rather to prevent genocide from happening in the future.

If retroactivity were accepted, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in December 1948 and entered into force in 1951, could be implemented not only in the case of WWII, but also WWI and other conflicts.

Would this be done by other countries accountable for the crimes in the past which, rightly or not, were said to constitute genocide?, Professor Tams said addressing the ICJ.

Tams said that Croatia's lawsuit is actually an attempt to make Serbia...