Amnesty International will continue to press NATO
Amnesty International will continue with its efforts to find mechanisms that will make it possible for NATO to answer for the 1999 bombing of the Serbian Radio Television (RTS) building, since not a single body in the world has jurisdiction over this most powerful military alliance on the planet, Amnesty International's Balkans expert Sian Jones has said.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Wednesday, May 06, 2009
"We will continue to make pressure on NATO, because over the past few years, we have obtained very convincing proof that human rights were violated during 1999", Jones said in an interview for the Belgrade daily Politika.
"It is true that The Hague Tribunal launched some kind of investigation, which was not a criminal investigation, but rather only a preliminary estimation as to whether there were grounds for criminal investigation", she reminded.
However, it all came to nothing, she added.
"We thought that RTS was under their (Tribunal) jurisdiction, because they deal with war crimes committed in the region of the Balkans", Jones noted.
The relatives of some people that were killed during the air raids, addressed the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but this court has also ruled that it is not authorized in the case of NATO, Jones underlined.
According to her, the reasons for all that should be sought in the complicated fact that the Alliance represents at the same time an organisation of specific countries and a separate entity.
For the time being, NATO is immune to criminal persecution, whether it involved the issue of murder of civilians in Serbia, or the murder of civilians in Afghanistan which we believe is still under way, Jones said.
