ABSTRACT
In February 1993, the Security Council of the United Nations took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of creating an ad hoc international criminal tribunal to prosecute persons responsible for violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia since January 1991. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established three months later, on 25 May 1993. It celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2013. In its 20 years of operation, the ICTY has gone through a number of distinct phases. In his contribution to a retrospective assessing the ICTY’s first 10 years, Mirko Klarin characterised it in terms of ‘four battles’: for survival, for respect, for hearts and minds, and for time.1 The Tribunal has entered a fifth phase, which we might characterise as a battle for its legacy. This is the subject of this volume, whose aim is to bring together a range of viewpoints and approaches to the question of what ICTY’s legacy was and will be in terms of its contribution to the restoration and maintenance of peace in the Western Balkans region. Before we get into the question of the Tribunal’s legacy, however, this chapter will briefly discuss the record of the Tribunal to date, building on the framework suggested by Klarin, and presenting the history of the Tribunal as a series of challenges: (1) to establish a court (survival); (2) to obtain cooperation (respect); (3) to secure legitimacy (hearts and minds); (4) to complete its work; and (5) to secure a legacy.
