On 29 November 1996 Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (“the ICTY”) handed down its sentence in the case of Dražen Erdemović. This was a decision of historie significance for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that it was the first sentence passed by an international war crimes tribunals, applying international law, since the International Military Tribunals which sat at Nuremberg and Tokyo between 1945 and 1948; it was also the first time a truly international tribunal bas concluded the trial of a minor war criminal, as opposed to a senior military commander or political leader. In addition, it was the first sentence handed down by the ICTY, which has been plagued sincc its first days of operation by problems in securing evidence and witnesses, not to mention the presence of the accused. Now the ICTY has shown, in the face of widespread criticism and accusations of impotence, that it can actually perform the task assigned to it. The doubt about such a judgment is that the Erdemović case is not perhaps the best basis on which to assess the ICTY's performance, so singular were the accused's conduct and, indeed, the circumstances in which he found himself before the Tribunal. Essentially, had it not been for the accused's voluntary surrender and his extensive co-operation with the Office of the Prosecutor, and the co-operation of the judirial authorities in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in transferring Erdemović to The Hague, the case would probably never have happened at all.
