Role of the State in hiding Ratko Mladić – State Secret
In response to a request from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) to provide a copy of the indictment against 11 people for helping hide the then fugitive Ratko Mladic, the First Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office responded that the indictment had been declared a state secret and that the public could not be informed. The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) considers that the decision to proclaim this document a state secret is illegal, and aimed at concealing the role of state organs in hiding war crimes indictees.
The President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Judge Carmel Agius, visited the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) on 31st October 2017. On this occasion, the judge spoke with representatives of the HLC about the efficiency of the prosecution of war crimes in Serbia, the cooperation of Serbia and the countries in the region with the ICTY, as well as with each other, and the importance of presenting the court-established facts to the post-conflict societies of the former Yugoslavia. 
The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) was visited yesterday by activists of “Justice for Peace in Donbass”, from Ukraine. This Coalition gathers NGOs and initiatives from Ukraine with the aim of documenting human rights violations in those regions that have been affected by the armed conflict since 2014. The aim of the Coalition is to collect all relevant human rights violations that will later support court proceedings against perpetrators of crimes and thus provide one of the basic preconditions for the return of peace and reconciliation in East Ukraine.
